Introducing Scheduled Reporting

Expanding on the existing canned report database and customizable reporting engine within BetterCloud, we’re excited to announce our third iteration of reporting functionality: scheduled reports.

With all of your Google Apps data centralized in one console, BetterCloud is able to reveal trends, risks, and stats about all of the activities on your domain. While reports can be generated manually, scheduling reports will save time and add the ability to monitor changes to your domain over time.

Creating Reports

BetterCloud’s reporting functionality covers 5 major areas of Google Apps: users, groups & group memberships, Org. Units, Drive, and Drive policies. With each area, admins can report on and filter by hundreds of fields, creating almost unlimited possibilities.

To get started, navigate to Reports in the top nav of the application, where you’ll see a list of any previously saved reports. Click build a report to start from scratch, and drag and drop any number of columns to structure the report, then layer filters to narrow down the results–by a particular Org. Unit or during a certain time period, for example. Title the finished report, then, to set it to run on a recurring basis, click Schedule.

This modal gives the option to set the frequency the report will run (on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis), as well as the time of day it’s sent. Choose additional admins or end users to email the report to, noting that at least one email address is required.

Once the report is scheduled, each time it runs you will receive an email notification and the report will export to a folder in your Google Drive called BetterCloud Reports (created by BetterCloud).

To adjust the schedule at any time, navigate back to My Reports and select Schedule from the Actions buttons on the right. In order to make changes to the report, click on the report name.

Additional Enhancements

In addition to the scheduling functionality, you might notice a few other changes to Reports.

→ New UI, featuring My Reports grid
→ Option to Save or Schedule a report
→ Shortcut icons to Run, Schedule, Copy, and Delete any saved report
→ Modal containing a direct link to view the report in Drive

Key Takeaways

Reporting isn’t just limited to the IT department–many admins are able to utilize BetterCloud’s reporting engine to perform security audits for the compliance team or find suspicious user activities that are of interest to HR. Another important use case is tracking Google Apps adoption by looking at usage changes over time. By auto-scheduling reports, admins can build something custom and set it to run on a schedule, and in a few months or a year, have a large enough dataset to make business decisions based on the findings.

For even more advanced reporting, use the ImportRange( ) function to bring in data from other spreadsheets and combine multiple reports, creating a reporting dashboard

Read the Help Center article for more details.