Scheduled messages allows reports to be sent as part of a message. This provides a powerful way to automate tasks such as sending out a report of anomalies in their department to a Supervisor every week, or sending an Employee a list of their working hours for the next month.

On the Create message, Modify message or Send one-time message page, click Modify report selection to open the Report selection page. For example:

Report section

The Report section allows you to select a Report the Supervisor has access to from the drop-down list under Report name. Next, the Supervisor can select the Report format from a drop-down list. The Report can be in the following formats:

• Text — include the Report as plain text in the message
• PDF — attach a .pdf file of the Report to the message
• CSV — attach a .csv file of the Report to the message

The If report is blank drop-down list allows you to select what will happen to the message if the attached Report is blank. You can select to send the message with a blank Report, send the message without a Report or don't send the message at all.

Selection section

This section allows you to choose to run the Report on the recipients only or to the recipients group. If recipients only is selected, the recipient will only see the Report as if they are the only Employee selected. If recipients group is selected, a box will display what Group the Report will run against and the recipients can see the Report of the entire Group. An additional option will be available to make your own Employee selection to run the Report on. For example:

Clicking on Selecting employees to run reports on will open the Employee selection page, where you can change the Employee selection for the Reports to run on.

Additional sections

Depending on what Report is selected, additional sections will appear on the Report selection page if further information is required to run the report:

• Date range — you can specify the date range of the Report if it requires one. You can chose what type of Data range to use from a drop-down list:

• • Dates from report — the default, use the dates as set on the Report
  • Current day/week/month/year — select one of the options to use the Date range of the current day, week, month or year
  • Absolute — select the start and end of the date range manually. These dates will not change depending on when the report is run, so while this is an easy way to run a report for a message to be sent immediately, it is not practical if the message is scheduled to be run repeatedly
  • Relative — allows you to select start and end dates as an offset (in days) from the date the message is sent. So if you always want to report on the previous 7 days, enter “-7” as the Start date offset (days) and -1 as the End date offset (days)

• User fields — If a report requires the user to set certain User fields before it can be run, these need to be set before the report can be attached to a message. In this case, a User fields button will be displayed below the Date range section. Clicking this button will display a new form containing a list of fields that must be specified.

Click Submit in the left-hand pane to attach the selected Report to the message and return to the previous page.