Overview

Cosmos provides a straightforward way to schedule and distribute reports to people inside, or outside, of your organization. You can control which days of the week the report should run on, what time the report should run, set any Report Options that apply to the scheduled report, and who the report should be emailed to.

This article will cover how to set up a new schedule for a report and contains the following sections:

Creating a Report Schedule

Setting When the Report Will Run

Setting Report Options for the Scheduled Report

Setting Who the Report Will Be Emailed To

Disabling a Report Schedule

Details

Creating a Report Schedule

To schedule a report to run, log into the Cosmos Portal, find the report that you would like to schedule, click the "..." in the lower-right corner of the report card, and click the Schedule button.

Scheduled reports can be set by Report Editors (not Report Viewers), and schedules that have been set for a report can be seen, edited, and deleted by any other Report Editors that have access to a report.

If there are no schedules currently set for a report, you will see a screen that looks like the screenshot below. Click Add to add a new schedule.

You can then click the pencil icon at the top to rename the scheduled task to something that describes what the schedule is.

You can then click Save to save the name of the schedule.

Setting When the Report Will Run

The next section will enable you to set when the report will run. You can pick which days of the week that you would like the report to run on. You can also pick the hour, minute, and AM/PM for the schedule. For minutes, you can currently schedule it in 30-minute increments, so at :00 or :30 after the hour. 

To schedule the report to run either monthly or on multiple days per month, click on the Monthly radio button. This will display a calendar that will allow you to select the dates to run the report on. Below is an example of a report scheduled to run on the 2nd, 13th, 16th, and 27th days of the month at 7am Pacific time. 

The time zone should default to your local time zone based on your browser settings, but you can also click the dropdown and select a specific time zone if desired.

The schedule below will run at 8:00AM Pacific on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of each week.

Setting Report Options for the Scheduled Report

Any Report Options that have been configured in the report are available to be set on the schedule. You can click any of the Report Options to expand them and change the filters, or if you do not wish to use a specific Report Option when the schedule runs you can disable the Report Option by toggling the Enabled slider off.

When working with dates and scheduled reports, it is highly recommended to build date logic into the report itself, using something like Excel Links, to have the report automatically know what date ranges to run the report for. 

Setting Who the Report Will Be Emailed To

In the Email section, you will be able to specify which users to email the report to. When clicking in the To section, any existing Cosmos users that have an email address defined will appear in the dropdown list. This makes it easy to quickly add internal users to the distribution list.

If you need to send the report to someone who is not a Cosmos user, you can type in their email address in the To section and press Enter. In the example below, the report will be emailed to two internal users (Brian and Anthony) along with a bank whose email address was entered manually.

You can then enter the Subject of the email that will go out, which is required, along with the body of the email if you wish to have a note sent out with the automated email as well. Entering text in both the Subject and Body sections is required.

When the report is emailed out, it will be sent from a scheduler@cosmosdatatech.com email address that is unattended by Cosmos. In addition, if several recipients are added to the distribution list, each recipient will receive a separate email. For example, if there are three recipients on the distribution list for a report, three emails will be sent out with each recipient being the only one in the To section of the email. The Excel file of the finished report will be attached to the email when it is sent out to the recipients.

Once the schedule has been configured, you will click the Add button to add the schedule to the list. You can add additional schedules as needed, and then you will click Save to save the changes for all schedules.

Disabling a Report Schedule

There may be a scenario where you want to disable a report schedule from running without having to delete the report schedule. To do this, toggle the Enabled button to off:

This will prevent the report schedule from running automatically, but it can still be run manually by clicking the "Run" button on the Scheduled Runs screen: