Reporting: All You Need to Know About Recurring Updates

Picture this.

You’re a Chief of Staff. Part of your job is to send a biweekly report to the Executive Leadership team in preparation for the biweekly Leadership Team Meetings. This report highlights cross-functional status updates provided by each department head.

In an attempt to save time, you add each department leader as an editor to the report. Since you don’t have the necessary context to create every update yourself, each week you email and slack department leaders the Monday before the Friday meeting to add their updates to the report.

The problem?

On occasion, high-quality & timely updates are made to the report, but often they’re forgotten by your busy team. Your valuable time is spent corralling and nagging team members for updates. Week after week, frustration ensues.

What should be an automated and seamless experience has become manual, even creating tension among your team.

Enter: The Recurring Update.

Recurring Updates in Elate allow users to assign specific sections of a report to be updated by the assignee on a regular, recurring basis. Rather than you manually reminding team members to update a section of a report, Elate handles this process from end-to-end, sending automated reminders, and directing report contributors to their designated report section, all while saving you time.

To create a Recurring Update, select "Add Recurring Update" from the bottom of your Report Widgets.

Note: Due to the nature of the Recurring Update feature, a report schedule must already exist in order to effectively use this feature. Be sure to create a report schedule prior to using. If necessary, you can create a schedule but wait to assign any recipients to your report as a workaround.

Since Recurring Updates are ultimately intended used alongside a recurring meeting, Elate has provided several customizable templates for you to choose from. Or, choose to create an update from scratch!

If you selected a template, the text will populate in the text box. You can add any additional text you’d like to include for the recipient.

Now it’s time to assign and schedule your Recurring Update.

First, select the user you’d like to update this section from the drop-down. Please note that assigning a user to a Recurring Update will give this individual full edit access to this report.

Note: Elate takes Report Privacy Settings very seriously. As is the case with all edit access, only Org Admins can be assigned to Recurring Updates when a report contains Private Team Data.

Next, select when you would like the Recurring Update reminder to be sent. Because Recurring Update reminders are designed to send prior to the report being sent, its reminder schedule is contingent upon the greater report schedule.

In the example above, the Executive Team Report was being sent biweekly on a Friday, with the next send being on Friday, August 22nd. If you'd normally send a reminder to stakeholders on Monday, for example, you would choose “4 Days Before the Report Sends”, to be sent on Monday, the 18th.

The Recurring Update populates like a normal text block on your Report. You will be able to see who’s been assigned to the Recurring Update in the bottom right corner of the paragraph, as well as when the reminder is scheduled to go out. You can see that this section was assigned to Lindsay Webb, and that she will be reminded on 8/18 at 2:55 pm.

Recurring Updates continue to be sent on a regular cadence unless if it is canceled, the report section is deleted, or the report schedule itself is cancelled.

Assignees of a recurring update will receive an email notification on the day the section was first assigned and with every recurring reminder going forward, based on the schedule you created.

Clicking “View In Elate” will automatically direct the recipient to the specific report section they’ve been asked to update.

If your Elate account has Slack and/or Teams setup, recipients will also receive a Slack or Teams notification, similarly to how they’d get notified to make a status update. As with the email, they will be auto-directed to their designated report section.

Making updates to a recurring update is very straightforward. As mentioned, assignees have full edit access and will be able to add as much detail to their section as they’d like.

Once changes have been made to a Recurring Update, Elate will note who has made their update by editing the text in the bottom right to the reflect the date and time of the edit. This will also reveal who hasn’t made their update for the week by default.

Editing a Recurring Update’s reminder schedule or changing an assignee is simple. Use the three-dot menu to select “Edit” to change who has been assigned to a Recurring Update or update the reminder cadence.

To cancel a recurring update entirely, select “Cancel”. This will stop all reminders from being sent and the last update will be converted to a normal paragraph block. Please note that this will not revoke edit access from the individual who was assigned to this section. If you would like to remove the user as an edit, you must also select their image in the upper left-hand corner and revoke their edit access that way.

Lastly, use the trash icon to remove the paragraph section entirely.