0421 817 265

Have you ever considered how useful it would be to be able to schedule reports in Chris21 to run automatically at regular intervals? You may have a report that is required by finance after each pay run. Scheduling this report will mean you no longer have to put in the time and effort to do it yourself.

It’s not just reports that can be scheduled. You can also schedule processes in Chris21 to run automatically. A good example is the Background Administrator process which is part of the Chris21 housekeeping procedures that administrators usually perform.

If you haven’t tried to schedule reports in Chris21 before, you may be surprised at how easy it is to do. I’ll run through an example. In our example we will schedule the Skills Update (SKU) process to run on a weekly basis.

The Skills Update process will transfers skills learned in a training course to attendees Skill (SKL) records. For a detailed description of this process see Updating Skills in Chris21.

Begin by opening the Skills Update form and setting the parameters as you normally would when you manually run this process:

Schedule reports in Chris21

Instead of saving the record at this point, click the Run Options tab at the bottom of the form. Then select the Schedule option as shown below:

Schedule reports in Chris21

The next step is to set the recurrence. Do this by clicking the Recurrence button:

Schedule reports in Chris21

This allows you to define the time of day the process will run and at what intervals. The screenshot below shows that we have scheduled this process to run as from the 15/03/2013 at 7AM and continue running at this time every Friday:

Schedule reports in Chris21

As you can see from the Recurrence dialog box above, you have the options to schedule you reports to run daily, weekly or monthly and you can also choose the days of the week. If you want to schedule a report to run daily but not on weekends, select the Daily radio button and then check all days of the week except for Sunday and Saturday.

Click the OK button to save the recurrence.

The process will create an output file that shows all records that were updated by the process. You can choose to email this output file. For example, your organisation may employ a training administrator to manage your training database. This person my request that they receive the output file via email.

To email the report, check the Email Output checkbox, then click the Email button:

Schedule reports in Chris21

Nominate the employee who will receive the email. This can be an email address, such as a generic mailbox for training information or you can enter an employee number in the Staff Member field:

Schedule reports in Chris21

Click OK when you have finished setting the email information, then click the Save button to save this schedule. The process is now scheduled to run beginning on the 15/03/2013 and will continue to run each Friday at 7AM.

Schedule reports in Chris21

Follow this process to schedule reports in Chris21. A simple tip to help make your life easier!