Advice for emailing reports to stakeholders

ian11 · 2025-02-18T23:28:30.070Z

Hello everyone.

I’m embarking on a new app build - the app will hold Ecommerce financial data (Sales, inventory, advertising spend, orders etc) generated by my clients.

I’d like to periodically email them reports. Things like a PL statement, or an advertising report etc.

I’ve been building on bubble for about 5 years now and I’ve never really figured out a great way to do this.

I am open to different report formats (PDF’s, Excel Files, Links, etc)

How would you do this if it was your app?

The only criteria is that it has to reflect a moment in time, and be dead simple to access (some clients aren’t tech savvy)

Sending a PDF report that is formatted nicely is my top choice…

But I have a feeling that I am going to have to build some sort of dashboard for each report type and have it be a static thing that can be linked to.

Thanks in advance for your input.

Sidenote: For each thing that is reported on, it will already have a live dashboard in the app for filtering, sorting etc - one idea I had was to clone that dashboard and make it a static thing… and then somehow download that as a PDF?

LittleBubbler · 2025-02-19T04:06:11.327Z

My app isn’t as data-intensive, but it has a similar output to yours. Perhaps it might give you some ideas on how to get started.

I use CSV generations for my reports. You are right. You’ll be designing a dashboard (or an interface) for the report. The good thing is, since Bubble’s pretty dynamic in this matter - you can create one & just substitute the data source based on your report’s searches.

I haven’t tried outputting the reports as PDFs, but CSVs have worked well for me. The plugin I use translates group data into appropriate columns and rows. When the user clicks on a button - it will export the group into a CSV, and/or E-mail them (I did both, in case they would like to have it E-mailed to a separate E-mail address).

I believe there’s a plugin that takes a screenshot and converts it to PDF, but I’m not sure if that suits your case study.

You can set a back-end workflow to recur the event every x period with an initial trigger if you’d like it to be automatically sent to your client.

ian11 · 2025-02-19T15:38:09.411Z

Thanks! I appreciate the insight.

I created an auditing app with a reporting function similar to this.

Maybe what I will do is have the report served via a link and have a report password that I can email along with the report for some confidentiality.