How to Schedule a Salesforce Report Easily: A Step-by-Step Guide

Imagine having an additional six hours every week.

You’d be able to do a lot more, right?

That’s exactly how much you might be able to save by automating specific tasks from your daily to-do list. According to a Smartsheet report, manual, repetitive tasks take up to a quarter of the workweek for over 40% of participants.

It’s comforting to know that you’re not the only one, but what’s the solution?

One way to save time if you use Salesforce is to learn how to schedule reports. By using this feature, you can avoid manual report creation and remove at least one item from your busy schedule.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through scheduling Salesforce reports, step by step.

Jump right to the section you’re interested in:

• How to Schedule a Report in Salesforce Classic
• How to Schedule a Report in Salesforce Lighting
• How to Check Scheduled Reports in Salesforce
• How to Set Up a Report Schedule in Salesforce
• How to Edit a Report Schedule in Salesforce
• How to Delete a Report Schedule in Salesforce
• Tips on Managing Salesforce Report Schedules
• Salesforce Report Scheduling Limitations
• Overcome Salesforce Reporting Limitations with Databox Scheduled Snapshots
• Best Practices for Databox Scheduled Snapshots
• Make Salesforce Reports Scheduling Easy with Databox

How to Schedule a Report in Salesforce Classic

You can save a lot of time by scheduling reports to run automatically instead of creating them manually. This is also true for Salesforce, so we’re sharing the instructions on how to do it.

1. Open the Reports tab.
2. Choose the report type that you’d like to schedule and click on its name.
3. Select the Run Report button and choose Schedule Future Runs from the drop-down menu.

4. In the new window, enter the necessary details about your report, like frequency or time.

5. When done entering the details, click on Save Report Schedule at the top of the window.

Related: How to Create and Use Reporting Snapshots in Salesforce: A Step By Step Guide

How to Schedule a Report in Salesforce Lightning

In Salesforce Lightning mode, you have two ways to schedule reports: with Reports and Dashboards. We’ll walk you through each.

1. Scheduling with Reports
2. Scheduling with Dashboards

Scheduling with Reports

1. Navigate to Reports and choose the report you want to schedule. Either click on the report or More Action to show the Subscribe button, then click it.
2. In the Edit Subscription window that pops up, find the Schedule tab and set up your report schedule: frequency, time and day, email report settings, etc.

3. Edit the default recipient under Subscribe and add people who should receive your schedule reports by clicking on the Add button.

4. Choose the desired recipients to email from your report dashboard under the Run Report As option. Your own user profile is set as default, but you can use the Search People button to add other users. Note that you’ll only be able to see those with access to the report.
5. Select a format for your report in which you want to attach it to the email: .XLSX or .CSV, with the option of encoding. Remember that this file can have up to 10MB in size. If the file is bigger, it may not get sent, or you may receive only a part of it, so you have to open Salesforce to see the whole report.
6. Before finally saving the settings, navigate to Conditions to set up specific conditions that need to be met for your report to be sent. This step is optional.

Scheduling with Dashboards

1. Open the Dashboards tab and select the More action option or click on the desired dashboard to see the Subscribe option, then click it.
2. Follow the same steps from the previous section to set up the details and schedule a report using a dashboard. You can email the report to multiple people whose email addresses you’ll add in the Subscribers section. If you want to unsubscribe one or more recipients, you can simply delete them from Subscribers, or click Unsubscribe to remove all.

Related: 10 Essential Metrics to Include in Your Salesforce Dashboard

How to Check Scheduled Reports in Salesforce

Depending on what Salesforce edition you have, you can schedule a different number of reports per month, for example, 93 reports in Professional Edition or up to 200 in Enterprise. To ensure that all necessary reports are scheduled and that you haven’t exceeded the limit, sometimes it’s necessary to check the scheduled reports.

If you need to do so, follow these steps:

1. Click on your name in Salesforce.
2. Choose Setup and then Monitoring.
3. Select Jobs and then Scheduled Jobs from the drop-down menu.

4. This list will show you all scheduled jobs, including data export, dashboard refresh, and more. To see your scheduled reports only, type EQUALS Report Run.
5. The reports you’ve scheduled will be listed on the next screen.

If using the Lightning version, do the following to check your scheduled dashboards:

1. Open All Reports.
2. Check the Subscribe column on the right. If there’s a checkmark next to a report, it’s scheduled.

How to Set Up a Report Schedule in Salesforce

Let’s see in a bit more detail how you can set up a report schedule in Salesforce. When you choose the Schedule Future Runs option from the Run Report menu, you will see a window with multiple options that determine how, when, and to whom your reports will be sent.

Running user: This person can access the folder where your report will be stored. They can see all the fields that the report contains and can give permission to other users to see the report, although other users may not have access to all fields. It depends on the Running User, who can also specify another running user by selecting View All Data.

Email settings: The report is automatically emailed to you, but you can add other user addresses to email the report to once it’s done. Note that the email address you want to add needs to be in the Salesforce user database.

Frequency: Choose if you want to run reports daily, weekly, or monthly.

Start and End fields: Choose the date ranges during which you want to run the reports.

Preferred Start Time: By selecting Find available times, you get to choose at what time you want to run reports.

Save Report Schedule: You can either save the report schedule only, or save it along with the modifications you’ve made–choose the option that suits you more.

Once you’re done with setting up all these options, you may have a weekly report scheduled to run on Mondays at 9AM and sent to you and your manager, for example.

How to Edit a Report Schedule in Salesforce

If you need to make changes to your report schedule, follow the same steps as when you’re setting up a new schedule–click on the Schedule Future Runs and then Run Reports from the Report tab. When you enter the desired changes, save the report schedule and you’re done.

How to Delete a Report Schedule in Salesforce

If you ever wish to remove a report schedule, follow the instructions from the previous section to open report details, then choose Unschedule Report at the top of the screen.

Tips on Managing Salesforce Report Schedules

1. If you have permission to schedule reports, you’ll see a checkmark icon in the schedule report column, so you can see its schedule without clicking on the report, just by hovering over the icon.
2. If you set up a report schedule, it’ll run automatically in your time zone. Bear this in mind to coordinate with any team members distributed in other time zones.
3. Avoid setting up a schedule that runs reports on the 31st each month. It means the reports won’t be created in months that only have 30 days.
4. Remember that it takes 30 minutes for Salesforce to run a report.
5. If you want to have a report chart, you need to email it from a dashboard, since emailed reports don’t contain charts.
6. If your report is bigger than 10MB, you can reduce its size by filtering for your records rather than all of them, or remove the columns you don’t need from the report.

Related: 14 Salesforce KPIs B2B Sales Teams Track the Most

Salesforce Report Scheduling Limitations

Scheduling Salesforce reports has plenty of benefits–you can analyze your data in real time, save time by skipping manual tasks, and avoid too many queries piling up. However, these reports come with a few limitations.

Number of reports: You can’t subscribe to more than five reports.

Type of reports: You can’t schedule joint and historical tracking reports, not conditional highlighting.

Number of subscribers: You can only add 500 email addresses as subscribers to a specific report. If you need to add more, the reports will be sent to users according to the priority, which is the following: User > Roles > Roles and Subordinates > Groups.

Admin permission: Platform edition requires an admin who will allow the subscription to a report.

Folder permission: For a user, group, or role to subscribe to a report, you need to give them permission to see the folder where the report is stored.

Related: HubSpot CRM vs. Salesforce: How to Choose the Right CRM

Overcome Salesforce Reporting Limitations with Databox Scheduled Snapshots

With the mentioned limitations in mind, it may be challenging to share your collected data with everyone who needs or wants to be in the loop. Some of your clients or team members will require a hard copy of the data report, too. Luckily, Databox came up with a unique solution.

Schedule your report snapshots in JPG or PDF formats. Scheduled snapshots allow you to rely on data when making important decisions without limitations regarding who has access to it and how often you can create and send streamlined reports. With Snapshots, you can even do it daily.

To access snapshots you want to schedule, do the following:

1. Open the Databoards page.
2. Hover over the desired Databoard and select Share Databoard.
3. Select the Snapshot tab.

Here’s how scheduling snapshots works:

1. Choose the Databoard or carousel you want to share and select the Share button.
2. Enter details regarding your reports:

• Delivery: You can choose how you want to receive alerts–via email, mobile, or Slack notifications.
• Recipients: You can enter the desired email addresses manually or choose specific users within your Databox account. When you enter an address, press tab to enter another one.
• Frequency: Choose when and how often you want to send out your Scheduled snapshots.
• File format: Opt for JPG or PDF formats. Note that selecting JPG distributes one separate JPG for every Databoard in the loop, while choosing PDF creates one PDF to distribute throughout Databoards.
• Subject & Message: Enter the text and subject line that will accompany your report in the email.
• Shareable Link: To provide a live version of the report along with the snapshot, click on the box to check it.
• Looped Databoards: This option is applicable to Databoards with a loop–you can select a specific Databoard for the snapshot, or the whole loop of Databoards. 

4. When you’ve entered all the details, click on the Schedule button and you’re done!

If you want to check what snapshots are scheduled in your account, simply click on Notifications, then choose Scheduled Snapshots.

Best Practices for Databox Scheduled Snapshots

To leverage the snapshots in the best way possible, we’re sharing a couple of best practices regarding scheduling these reports.

• Storing Snapshots in Folders
• Monitoring Data with Weekly Reports

Storing Snapshots in Folders

For monthly reporting, set up your scheduled snapshots for the last day of the month. This way, you’ll be able to collect all relevant data during a month. If there are several snapshots scheduled for that same day, set up an inbox filter to store them in separate folders, so you don’t lose them in the sea of other messages.

Monitoring Data with Weekly Reports

Monitoring data is just as important as reporting–it can give you a chance to react promptly if you notice a trend in your data, whether to fix an issue or seize an opportunity.

Scheduled Snapshots allow you to monitor your data more regularly to avoid feeling overwhelmed with a bunch of data that you have to connect the dots between what you did and what your results are at the end of the month.

Monitoring can save your time and receiving scheduled Snapshots helps you form that habit. Then, with all your activities fresh in your mind, it’ll be easier to piece the data together and draw conclusions.

Make Salesforce Reports Scheduling Easy with Databox

Salesforce reports allow you a great insight into your data, but they may not be scalable and flexible enough to provide your whole team with the necessary information. There are only so many reports you can schedule or subscribe to, so you may find yourself limited when it comes to sharing the reports with everyone involved without doing it manually.

But what if you could share an unlimited amount of data with everyone who needs to have an insight? What if you could set up the process once and enjoy receiving the data right in your inbox at the desired times?

Databox turns “what ifs” into “yes, you can.”

Connect your Salesforce account with Databox and pull your data into a streamlined dashboard so you can fully leverage the power of Salesforce without limitations.

Scheduled snapshots allow you to automatically share JPG or PDF snapshots of your data with your team at regular times and make data-driven decisions a part of your team routine. Knowing and providing data-backed insights is better than guessing, isn’t it?

Try out scheduled snapshots today–sign up for free!