Scheduled reports - automation and schedules
What Scheduled Reports Do
The manual approach—opening your inbox, reviewing updates, and generating a report—requires discipline and time. For teams that want to fully integrate competitive monitoring into their workflow, there’s an alternative: scheduled reports run fully automatically.
A scheduled report is like a subscription: you configure once what the report should contain, when it should run, and who should receive it. After that, Picasi generates it regularly and sends it out without any further action on your part.
When Scheduled Reports Make Sense
A daily summary of LinkedIn posts from your five key competitors—that’s a classic scenario for a daily report. Weekly analyses are well-suited for strategic meetings. Monthly reports are ideal for quarterly reviews or reports to senior management.
The key advantage over manual generation: Scheduled reports run even when no one on the team remembers to do so. This makes them particularly valuable for repetitive, regular information needs.
How Execution Works
Picasi checks every 15 minutes to see if any scheduled reports are due. When a report is due, Picasi collects the updates from the configured time frame (last day, last week, or last month), applies the configured filters, and generates the report.
If there are no relevant updates within the time frame, Picasi creates an empty report—or skips it if you’ve enabled “hide empty reports.”
Interaction with the public feed
Scheduled reports can be published as a public feed. This means: After each generation, the feed is updated, and anyone who knows the feed URL can read the latest report—without a Picasi account.
The report can be subscribed to in feed reader apps via the RSS feed. This is useful for stakeholders who want to stay regularly updated but don’t need their own Picasi access.
Things to keep in mind
Update basis: Scheduled reports access all updates within the configured timeframe—not just the ones you’ve saved. If you want to limit a daily report to specific sources, configure the filters accordingly.
Analyses need a buffer: Analyses are only available weekly or monthly because they require a sufficiently large data set. A daily report based on three updates does not provide a meaningful strategic assessment.
Limits: Scheduled reports also consume your monthly AI report quota. With many automatic reports, you can quickly reach the limit.