Once you know the data you want to inform your business decisions, you won't want to have to build and run a report every time you need to see that data. Lightspeed Analytics allows you to save your customizations and schedule the results to be emailed to you automatically.
Saving reports
Whether you've made some minor tweaks to an existing report or designed your own custom report, you can save the changes you've made, saving you the time of making the same tweaks again in the future. The next time you need that information, you can simply open the saved report and click Run.
To save a report:
- Click Save or Save as new in the upper right-hand corner of the report.
- Give the new custom report a Title and a Description.
- Optionally, check Share with entire company to make your new report available to other users on your Analytics account.
- Click Save changes or Save as new.
If you are modifying an existing report for the first time, you'll see the Save as new option because you cannot overwrite the core reports in Lightspeed Analytics. However, if you're modifying a custom report, you'll see the Save option, though you'll also have the option to Save as new as pictured above. Note that if you Save changes on a custom report, you will overwrite the previous version of that report.
Once you've saved your reports, they can be accessed by clicking on Custom Reports under either the Sales & Inventory, Employee Performance, or Marketing menus.
Scheduling a report
Whether you're looking at a custom report you've designed or one of the core reports in Lightspeed Analytics, you can schedule that report to be emailed to you either daily, weekly, or monthly.
To do so:
- Click Schedule in the upper right-hand corner of the report.
- Using the drop-down menu, select the Frequency of the email from:
- Daily
- Weekly
- Monthly
- If weekly, select the day of the week you'd like to receive the emailed report.
- If monthly, select the day of the month you'd like to receive the emailed report.
- Check Alert Mode if you only want to receive the email if there is new data to share.
- Using the drop-down menu, select the recipient or select Enter other email address to manually enter the address of the desired recipient. You can click the + button to add more than one recipient at a time.
Lightspeed Analytics begins sending out scheduled emails daily at 10:00 AM Eastern Time.
Downloading a report
You can also save the results from your report to your desktop.
To do so:
- Click on the gear icon in the top right-hand corner of the report.
- Click Download.
- Using the drop-down menu, select the desired file format for the saved report.
- Select the desired options for Results, Values, and Limit. You can learn more about these options here.
- Enter a Filename.
- Click Download.
Downloading the report lets you import your results into the tool of your choice for further analysis.