Tip #182 - How to Schedule Monthly Reports

The ability to have reports automatically generated and emailed to yourself (or anyone else) on a schedule that you select, is one of the great tools available in SmartAdvocate.^[1]

It is possible that you may need to schedule several reports, however, to cover the specific period that you want, e.g., a “monthly report” that covers the first day of the month to the last day of the month. Since the 12 months of the year have different numbers of days, you may need to account for the variations, and schedule more than one report. Let’s say for example, that you want to have the "New Cases Report" sent to you at the end of each month to show the number of new intakes for that month. You would not get accurate results if you scheduled the report to go out on the 31st (this is because, of course, some months have 30 days and February has 28 or 29 days, depending).

The best way to set up your reports to accomplish the above example would be to schedule four separate reports:

One for each month with 30 days. We will call the first report the “30-day Report”. This would be generated for April, June, September and November.
One for each month with 31 days. The second report we will call the “31-day Report” which will be generated for January, March, May, July, August, October and December.
One for February 28th. We will call this the “February 28th Report”.
One for February 29th. We will call this the "February 29th Report".

The Schedule Details should look like the following for your 30-Day Reports:

The Schedule Details should look like the following for the 31-Day Reports:

The Schedule Details should look like the following for the February 28th Report:

Last, the Schedule Details should look like the following for the February 29th Report :

Note that in the examples shown above, the “Start Time” for the reports is set to 11:59PM. That way, the reports should technically include new intakes for the entire last day of the month.

After you have entered the appropriate “Schedule Details” for the report you are working on, you will need to complete the “Report Parameters” including the number of days that the report will cover. It is important that for each report, you select “Custom Days” in the Date Range Value/Field (see example below). The “From” and “To” fields should be Null.

For the “30-Day Reports” you will enter 30 in the Days From and 0 (zero) in the Days To, for the “31-Day Reports” you will enter 31 in the Days From field and 0 (zero) in the Days To field, and the appropriate number for the February 28^th and February 29^th Reports.

[1] Here we will be focusing primarily on the scheduling of the report and not so much the various filters that can be applied depending on the information you want in the report.