Using the Acuity Schedule Wizard

The Acuity Schedule Wizard facilitates the scheduling of reports by illustrating the processes required in a step-by-step view (how to copy, edit, and schedule the report to run on a recurring basis). The wizard appears after three manual generations of the same report.

There are three key steps required in scheduling a report:

  1. If the report sits within the standard report library, make a copy of it in your private or client folder.
  2. Edit the new saved report’s query to use a dynamic date range.
  3. Schedule the report to run for a set recurrence.

Copy the Report

If the report is already in a private folder, skip this step. Otherwise:

  1. Use the Copy function to copy it from the Standard Reporting Library to your private or client folder.
  2. Select the folder, and click Copy.

Edit the Report

  1. From the private or client folder, run the new report.
  2. When the new report opens, click Design in the top right corner to open in Edit mode.
  3. Click the Available Objects icon to access elements.
  4. Drag and drop the date filter you want to base the report on from the Available Objects to the report.
    • Use a pre-built dynamic date filter. Pre-built filters have a yellow funnel icon to the left of them. Each of the date folders contains a set of pre-built dynamic date filters.Note: the “prompt” filters are not dynamic.
    • If a pre-built filter does not fit your scheduling needs, you can create your own dynamic date filter using any date existing in the object universe (i.e., Payment Date, Submission Date, Service Thru Date, and Release Date). The example below creates a dynamic date filter using submission date.

The example below will have the report run by the submission date for the first of the current month until the present date. For more options on how to see the Dynamic Date Scheduling guide.

Once you have completed the dates to run dynamically according to your scheduled recurrence (e.g., for the previous month, last 90 days, etc), click Save on the top left of the screen.

You may now close out of the report to schedule it.

Schedule the Report

The report will now run automatically at the specified time. Each time the report is run, it will generate an instance in the system.

  1. Once you have saved and closed out of the report, click Schedule on the report pod.
  2. The scheduling screen opens to a listing of schedules for this report if any exist. To add to that schedule, click on the New Scheduled Report link located in the upper right corner of the dialog box.
  3. Configure the scheduling options in the panel to fit your reporting need. All fields are required unless otherwise noted:
    • Instance Name - Assign a name to the scheduling instance. This does not change the name of the report but may help identify a particular instance of the report.
    • Recurrence - Choose when you want the report to run automatically (once, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly). Also select the time, date, or range that you want the schedule to run.
    • Parameters - Select the prompts to be entered when the report runs. Prompts will vary according to the report selected.
    • Format and Destination - Specify the output format and location to send the report when scheduling. In most cases, you will use the default of Web Intelligence output format, but you may wish to schedule a report to run as an XLS, PDF, CSV, TXT, or CSV archive (zip) file instead. Reports are automatically saved to the report history, but in addition, you can choose to send them to any Acuity user in your organization or to Assurance for more secure sharing. You may also opt to receive an e-mail notifying yourself and others when a report instance has successfully completed running.
  4. Click Save to set the schedule.