Scheduling reports with subscriptions

Subscription reports let you schedule recurring emails containing your preferred sheets or chart. You can set your desired filters and have a report with the newest data delivered to your inbox at a scheduled time. For example, you could receive overnight order information in an email every morning. You can edit subscriptions you own at any time.

Subscriptions follow the same access rules as apps, data, and spaces. Owners and recipients are restricted according to section access, permissions, and user entitlements (Professional and Analyzer). Recipients will only receive data they have access to.

A subscription report email contains:

• A PDF or PowerPoint file of the subscribed visualization or sheets as an attachment. Image resolution will be 300 DPI.

• An image of the visualization. There is no image if you subscribe to sheets.

• A link to the app, so you can see the original point of analysis. If the subscription includes more than one sheet, the first sheet in the list is opened.

• A link to your subscription management page.

Prerequisites

Subscriptions have the following prerequisites:

• Subscriptions must be turned on by a Qlik Cloud admin. For more information, see Managing availability of reporting, subscriptions, and sharing.

• You need a valid email address configured in Qlik Cloud.

• You need to have view permissions for the app in which you are creating subscriptions.

Creating a subscription

You can create a subscription based on a visualization or a sheet. When you create a subscription, you become the owner. If you own a subscription, you can add recipients to it. For more information, see Sharing a subscription. If you create a subscription based on a sheet, you can add up to 10 sheets to the subscription.

Do the following:

1. Open the sheet in analysis mode. Do one of the following:

   • Right-click on a visualization, and select Subscribe.

   • On the top bar, click , and select Subscribe to sheet.

2. Title

   Enter a Title for the subscription. This will be used as the email subject.

3. Description

   This field is optional. This will appear in the body of the email. This section can be used to differentiate between subscriptions that are similar.

   For example: Weekly sales - East coast and Weekly Sales - West coast.

4. Format

   Choose between PDF or Microsoft PowerPoint. If your reports are distributed as PowerPoint files, they can be edited by your recipients.

5. Sheets

   If you based the subscription on a sheet, you can add more sheets to the subscription. The maximum number of sheets is 10.

   You can sort the sheets to change the order they are displayed in the email.

6. Send email

   Choose how often the subscription will generate a report. The time you set is when report generation will start, not when the report will be received:

   • Daily: choose what time the report will be generated each day.

   • Weekly: choose which days of the week the report will be sent. You can select as many days as you want.

   • Monthly: choose which days of the month the report will be sent. You can select as many days as you want.

7. Time

   Choose the time of day the subscription will send a report.

   This is the time the report will be added to the queue for generation. It is not the time you will receive the report. To learn about report generation times, see Report emails not arriving when scheduled.

8. Turn on Add users to subscription to add recipients to the subscription.

9. Click Subscribe.

Managing your subscriptions

Click Subscriptions from the left-hand panel in the hub to see a list of subscriptions owned by you, as well as subscriptions to which you have been added as a recipient. You can also access Subscriptions from the user profile menu in the upper right-hand corner of the application.

How timezones are displayed for alerts and subscriptions with recurring schedules

In the hub, the time or timezone displayed will usually match the timezone you have set in Profile settings. One exception is the recurring interval schedule for alerts and subscriptions.

If you look at the Details page for an alert or subscription, you can see the next scheduled run-time under Scheduled. The time under Scheduled will reflect your timezone. If you hover over the , a tooltip will appear showing how often the subscription or alert is sent.

This image shows what it looks like when the creator and recipient live in the same timezone:

• The next scheduled run-time is: April 3, 2023 at 2:15 PM.

• The dark grey tooltip shows how often the subscription is sent: Every week, Monday and Wednesday, at 2:15 PM.

However, the tooltip will show a if the alert or subscription was created in a different timezone than the recipient. In this case, the schedule will be shown in the timezone the alert or subscription was created.

For example, a user in Toronto, Canada (GMT-4) creates a subscription. They add a recipient who lives in Stockholm, Sweden (GMT+2). There is a 6-hour time difference between them. The Swedish recipient checks the details page to find out how often they will receive this subscription. Under Scheduled, the time displayed is in the correct timezone: Stockholm, Sweden. However, if the recipient hovers over the , the tooltip shows the entire subscription schedule in the Canadian timezone:

• The next scheduled run-time is March 13, 2023, 3:30 PM.

• The dark grey tooltip shows the subscription schedule, but in the Canadian timezone: Created in (GMT -4:00) America/Toronto: Every week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday 9:30 AM.

Limitations

• You can create up to 100 subscriptions.

• You can include up to 10 sheets.

• A subscription can have up to 100 recipients.

• If a subscription fails to generate three times, it will be turned off.

• If export fails for one or more sheets in the subscription, the report will not be generated. Possible causes:

  • The recipient does not have access to all sheets in the subscription.

  • A sheet has been deleted.

• You cannot subscribe to:

  • Filter pane objects

  • Container objects. You can subscribe to objects inside a container.

  • Dashboard bundle extensions
  • Visualization bundle extensions
  • Dynamic charts
  • Third-party extensions and action buttons

• This capability is a form of reporting in Qlik Cloud Analytics. Across all forms of reporting, a tenant can make a maximum of 30,000 reporting-related requests per day.

• When using a custom font in your app, it is assumed you have the required license to use that font in output from Qlik Sense. To ensure your fonts are licensed, make use of the multiple open-source fonts available in Qlik Sense for styling app content.

  If you have the required licenses for a font that is not available in the default Qlik Sense themes, Create themes with custom fonts to learn about adding the font to a custom theme.

• When characters that are unsupported in the selected font are used in app content, these characters will be rendered in output with a font in which they are supported. Different behavior might be noticed if a custom font is used.

• If you use a custom theme in your app to define font use (for example, adding a font file directly to the theme), fonts rendered in various outputs might not be the same fonts you have used in your app.

• Shadows applied to chart objects in the app are not shown in the generated subscription report.

Troubleshooting

Report emails not arriving when scheduled

A report subscription is set to start at a specific time, but does not arrive in your email inbox until hours later.

Possible cause  

The time set in the subscription is the time report generation starts, not the time it arrives in your inbox. The time it takes for a report to generate depends on several factors. Most notably:

• Number of active Qlik Cloud users

• Number of active or queued processes: alerts, data reloads, subscriptions

Proposed action  

Set your subscription to run at a non-peak time. If you and your recipients start work at 9 AM, set your subscriptions to run at 6 AM.