Subscribing external recipients to favorite reports

Tips and tricks
1

Hello! We are migrating to Phocas and one of the features of our previous system was automating reports. For example, we send monthly sales data to some of our vendors. Is there a way to subscribe external email addresses to reports? I see how I can subscribe myself, but I cannot subscribe other Phocas users or non Phocas users. I tried Exporting via Email but that puts the data in the body of the email; I’d like it sent as an attachment. Also the Exporting is not automatable. If anyone knows about this please let me know what you know!

2

Hey Rebecca,

From my experience, you cannot subscribe external recipients. I do wish this was a function that would get added to Phocas! If you’re an admin, you can subscribe other internal Phocas users to reports yourself (by going to Admin → Favorites), otherwise you can share reports to those users and they could subscribe themselves (as long as they have access to the database underneath the data).

I do send monthly and quarterly reports to both vendors and customers. In these cases, I just subscribe to either the XLSX or a PDF to my own license, then I set up Rules on my email inbox to auto-forward to the ultimate recipients. This has worked well for me - the only snag being that some organizations have safeguards on their email system that doesn’t allow users to auto-forward external emails (which I’ve had to have IT create exceptions for at times).

Hope this helps!
Tim

3

Hi Tim!

I was afraid of that, it’s totally doable to create rules in my email platform, but does have some potential snags. Thank you for sharing what you know and taking the time to respond! I was looking everywhere and I’m glad to know I didn’t just miss something obvious.

Thanks for the tip about subscribing other Users, I will try that out! I appreciate it.

4

Happy to help! Agreed, the rules on email is definitely not the ideal solution, but it’s worked well enough for me for a bunch of years!

5

How would it be possible to push toward an improvement in Phocas development? This is a great hinderance to this reporting software that I haven’t come across on any other reporting softwares.

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