Managing Scheduled Reports

Jennifer Trower Updated by Jennifer Trower

Read Time: 5 mins

Scheduled reports deliver recurring report results to email recipients or to an SFTP destination on a defined schedule. Understanding how schedules execute and the current 5,000-row limit, helps you avoid the most common delivery failures.

You can use this article to troubleshoot delivery issues and to understand current row-limit behavior before contacting support.

Permissions

Before getting started, your user roles will need to be adjusted to account for the permissions required to use the Reports feature.

If you're a Super Admin, you already have full access, and no changes are needed. To learn more, see the Roles and Permissions article.

To create or modify a scheduled report, you need:

  1. Permission Details
    1. View generated FCC Form 477 reports: allows you to generate a FCC Form 477 report.
    2. Create a FCC Form 477 report: allows you to create a FCC Form 477 report.
    3. View account reports: allows you to view account-category reports (delinquency, churn, account status).
    4. View financial reports: allows you to view financial-category reports (Aged Receivables, Invoiced Revenue, Daily Payments, Disbursements).
  2. An Editor license (set under Settings > Integrations > Report Licenses).
    To receive a scheduled report as an email or SFTP recipient, no license is required. Recipients only need to be specified in the schedule.
Scheduled reports run under the identity of the user who scheduled them. If that user loses the relevant read permission or has their Editor license revoked, scheduled deliveries from their account may stop working. Even if the recipients still have full access.

When the original scheduling user leaves or changes roles, scheduled reports they own should be recreated under an active user.
Only Super Admins can assign or revoke report licenses.

How Scheduled Reports Execute

Scheduled reports run under the identity of the user who originally scheduled them. This has important implications:

  • If the scheduling user is deactivated, the schedule will fail.
  • If the scheduling user's permissions change such that they can no longer access the report data, the schedule will fail.
  • Following a permission change or platform update, the scheduling user may need to log in and reopen the report to refresh their session before the schedule resumes working.

Scheduling Saved Reports

When scheduling a report, where you save it matters.

  • If you save and schedule the report as a Looker report, you will not be able to access or edit the schedule later. To update recipients or make minor changes, you will need to contact Support.
  • If the report is saved to the Reports screen in the instance, the report owner can access the schedule and make changes to it. Support can also unpublish the report if report changes are needed.

Managing Recipients

  1. Navigate to Reports > Dashboards and open the dashboard.
  2. Open the schedule settings for the report.
  3. Add or remove recipient email addresses.
  4. Save changes.
To add additional recipients to an existing schedule without disturbing the original recipient list, edit the schedule and append the new email.

Do not create a duplicate schedule.

Deleting a Scheduled Report

Deleting a scheduled report stops all future deliveries immediately. No further emails or SFTP deliveries will be sent. Past deliveries are not recalled.

If you want to pause rather than permanently stop a schedule, edit the schedule and disable it instead of deleting.

Current Limitation: 5,000-Row Cap

Scheduled dashboards are limited to 5,000 rows. This limit applies to scheduled dashboards from the main Reports screen.

Looker introduced a permission requirement for scheduled reports that return more than 5,000 rows. As a result:

  • Scheduled reports under 5,000 rows: Deliver normally.
  • Scheduled reports over 5,000 rows: May fail to send.
  • All non-scheduled reports: Unaffected when run manually.
  • All other reporting features: Unaffected.

If users need to schedule more than 5,000 rows, they can save and schedule an individual dashboard tile instead. In Looker, this is called a Look. When scheduling a Look, users can select the option to send all results.

Workarounds for reports that exceed 5,000 rows:

  • Filter the report to reduce the row count below 5,000, such as splitting a national report into regional reports.
  • Schedule multiple narrower reports instead of one large report.
  • Save and schedule an individual dashboard tile, or Look, and choose to send all results.
    For more information on how to complete this, review this article.
  • Use SFTP delivery for large datasets where supported.
  • Run the report manually when the full row count is needed.
If you must keep a large scheduled report and none of the workarounds apply, contact Support to refresh the scheduling user’s permissions.

SFTP Delivery

Reports can be delivered to a third-party SFTP destination on a recurring schedule.

Configuration requirements:

  • Valid SFTP host, port, username, and authentication credentials
  • Correct destination path
  • Filename pattern, which defaults to the report name, date, and a timestamp suffix, such as T1121

SFTP allowlist requirements:

If the receiving SFTP server is blocking deliveries by IP, the following IP addresses must be allowlisted:

  • 34.200.64.243
  • 54.157.231.76
  • 18.206.32.254

If SFTP delivery is not arriving:

  • Confirm the SFTP credentials are still valid on the receiving end.
  • Confirm the destination path exists and is writable.
  • Confirm the recipient is not blocking deliveries by IP.
  • If IP blocking is enabled, confirm the IP addresses above have been allowlisted.
  • Check whether the report exceeds the 5,000-row limit above.
If all of the above are correct, open a support ticket.

Filename Customization

Scheduled report filenames follow a fixed default pattern that includes the report name, date, and time suffix. Filename customization (for example, removing dashes from the date or removing the time suffix) is not currently a user-configurable option.

Contact support if you have a specific filename requirement for a third-party system.

Naming and Tracking Schedules

When you have multiple scheduled deliveries on a single dashboard, give each schedule a distinct, descriptive name (for example, “Weekly_AR_to_Finance” vs. “Daily_AR_to_Ops”). This makes it easier to identify which schedule to modify or delete later. Generic names like “copy” or “schedule 2” lead to confusion when troubleshooting.

How did we do?

How to Unpublish a Report or Dashboard

Report Licenses

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