Automated marketing reporting means the numbers arrive in your inbox or on screen without anyone building them. No Monday-morning export, no copy-paste into a spreadsheet, no one person holding the only version. This article answers how to set up reports that send themselves and alerts that fire when something breaks, using Reporting and Automation in the levelpartner.ai platform, and how to decide which reports deserve to be automated at all.
The two kinds of automated reporting
The first kind is scheduled: a custom report built from a dashboard and delivered to named people at a fixed time, such as every Monday at 8am or the first working day of the month. It replaces the manual report.
The second kind is triggered: an alert that fires only when something crosses a line. A deal that has sat in the same stage for a week. A proposal nobody has followed up. A qualified enquiry left waiting. It replaces the moment someone notices, too late, that something broke last week.
Most firms only build the first kind. The second kind usually saves more money.
Before you start
- A dashboard that people already find useful.
- Source capture working on forms, calendars and calls.
- A list of the people who should receive each report.
- Permission to build workflows in Automation.
How to set it up
- Pick the one report someone currently builds by hand each week.
- Go to Reporting, click Custom Reports, then New Report.
- Convert the existing dashboard that holds the same figures.
- Click Save, then choose Schedule.
- Set Frequency, Time and Date Range for the weekly send.
- Add the meeting attendees under Recipients, then click Save and Schedule.
- Go to Automation, then Workflows, and click + Create Workflow.
- Add the Stale Opportunities trigger and click Add Filters.
- Set Duration in Days, In Pipeline and Pipeline Stage, then Save Trigger.
- Add an internal notification to one owner, then switch Draft to Publish.
- Test the alert with a test opportunity before relying on it.
- Review the automated reports each quarter and cut unused ones.
What it is for in a 10 to 250 person firm
In a firm with flat revenue, the person producing reports is often a senior marketer or an operations lead whose time is worth more elsewhere. Automating the weekly report gives that time back. More importantly, it makes the report reliable. Manual reports skip weeks during holidays and busy periods, which is exactly when problems hide.
Triggered alerts change how quickly you react. A broken form discovered after two days costs two days of enquiries. Discovered after two weeks, it can cost a month's pipeline.
Suppose the operations manager spends about three hours every Monday assembling lead and pipeline figures. A scheduled custom report could turn that into 15 minutes of reading. Now say the stale-deal alert flags 14 applications in a quarter that have sat at the documents stage for over a week. Each one would be chased within a day instead of discovered at month end. The numbers are hypothetical.
What it replaces
It replaces the spreadsheet that lives on one person's laptop, the screenshots pasted into a slide deck, and the delay between something breaking and someone noticing. It does not replace judgement. Somebody still has to read the report and decide what to change.
Time it takes
Setting up one scheduled report and three alerts takes two to three hours. Maintenance is low: a quarterly check that recipients are still right and alerts still make sense. The saving is usually several hours a week, plus the losses avoided by catching breakages early.
The mistake most people make
Automating every report you can think of. Inboxes fill with summaries nobody reads, and the important alert gets lost among them. Automate the reports a meeting depends on and the alerts that protect revenue. If nobody would notice a report stopping, stop sending it.
When not to automate
Do not automate a report whose figures you do not yet trust. Automating it spreads wrong numbers faster. Fix the data first. It is also worth keeping a monthly strategic review manual, at least in part, because writing the commentary forces someone to think about what the numbers mean.
For the dashboards that sit behind these reports, see marketing reporting dashboards. To decide which numbers deserve an alert threshold, the marketing KPI dashboard guide helps. If you report on campaigns specifically, see the campaign dashboard guide.
Troubleshooting
The scheduled email never arrives. Check the recipient address, spam filters and whether the schedule is saved. Send a test to yourself first.
Alerts fire constantly. The threshold is too tight. Widen it, for example from three days in a stage to seven, or limit it to one pipeline.
Alerts never fire, even when something broke. The trigger is watching the wrong pipeline or stage. Leave a test opportunity in the stage past the threshold and watch the workflow history.
People ignore the summary email. It is too long or arrives at the wrong time. Cut it to the three numbers the meeting discusses and send it an hour before the meeting.
Frequently asked questions
Can automated reports go to people outside the platform?
Scheduled custom reports can be emailed to any address you add, and recipients do not need a login. Keep the list short and check it each quarter, because people leave and roles change.
Should alerts go to a group or one person?
One person. Alerts sent to a group are often ignored by everyone, each assuming someone else will act.
How often should scheduled reports run?
Weekly for operational figures such as leads and booked calls. Monthly for revenue and spend. Daily reports are rarely worth it for service businesses.
Can AI write the commentary on the report?
AI content tools can draft a summary of what changed. Treat the draft as a starting point and have a person confirm the reading before it is shared.