Most reporting work is not analysis. It is the same refresh, the same clean-up, the same Excel export and the same e-mail, every morning, by hand. Automated reporting turns that routine into scheduled Excel reports, PDFs and e-mails and repeatable analysis pipelines that run before anyone opens a laptop — in a guaranteed order, with a log of every run. This guide sets out what report automation needs to do in a regulated business, and how ATX AnalyticsTable by ATX Institute does it.
Report automation is four jobs chained together: get fresh data, prepare it, calculate and lay out the report, then deliver it. Analytics automation means each of those jobs is defined once — as a schedule, a pipeline, a report definition and a distribution rule — and re-run without anyone touching it.
The test is simple: if the person who built the report is on holiday, does it still arrive on time and with the right numbers?
The most common request is the simplest one: the same Excel file, with today's data, in the same folder or inbox every morning. In ATX AnalyticsTable that is a parameter, an export and a schedule — no VBA macro, no Task Scheduler script and no PC that has to stay logged in with Excel open.
A scheduled report is only as good as the order its steps run in. Refreshing the data after the export has already left is the classic failure. ATX AnalyticsTable's scheduler numbers its schedules: numbered ones run one at a time in ascending order, and formulas recalculate inside the same run after every data refresh, before the next step starts.
The preparation in the middle — sorting, de-duplicating, mapping values, cleaning text, masking personal data, running SQL — is a pipeline: an ordered, versioned recipe bound to a dataset and re-applied automatically every time that dataset refreshes. Every run appends a line to an append-only run log, so you can see what ran, when and against what.
Pipelines can also reach outside the table: an AI analysis step that summarises or classifies the data, a step that sends the result by e-mail, and steps that export or import files.
A saved PDF report collects ranges, pinned queries, charts, dashboards and text into one document with page setup, branding and security options, and can be exported on a schedule. Because a report stores its sources rather than a copy of the data, every print reads them again.
Results can also go out as e-mail through SMTP, Microsoft Graph, MailerSend or Azure Communication Services, with the table attached as CSV, Excel or HTML, templated subjects that carry run details, and guardrails: a maximum number of recipients, an allow-list of domains, and no send when the table is empty.
Not every report needs to be read every day. Alert rules watch a pipeline, a saved query or a grid range on their own schedule and send only when a condition is met — a row count, an aggregate crossing a value, any single row breaching, data arriving for a new period, or the data changing — with a cooldown, once-per-change suppression and an optional recovery message.
Ask Greg, the AI analyst in ATX AnalyticsTable, can propose the whole routine from a sentence — "clean this every morning and e-mail me the result" — as a pipeline, a PDF report, an alert and a schedule linked together. Each one is dry-run against today's data first: a schedule shows its next three runs, an alert says whether it would fire now. Nothing is sent or saved until you place it.
Every pipeline, export definition and schedule is a plain-text file in the project, so a change to what leaves the organisation is a reviewable Git diff rather than a discovery. Backups checkpoint the database before zipping the project, and the software runs on your own machines — nothing is sent to a reporting cloud.
Define the report once — the data source, any preparation pipeline and an Excel export — then add a schedule. ATX AnalyticsTable refreshes the data, recalculates formulas and writes a new, dated Excel file at the set time, without anyone opening Excel.
Yes. A pipeline step or alert can send the result through SMTP, Microsoft Graph, MailerSend or Azure Communication Services with the table attached as Excel, CSV or HTML, a templated subject, a recipient limit and a domain allow-list, and it skips the send when the table is empty.
No. The schedule, export and e-mail are set in dialogs and saved as plain-text files in the project, so they can be reviewed in Git. Ask Greg can also propose the whole routine from one sentence.
Producing and distributing recurring reports without manual work: data is refreshed, prepared, calculated and delivered on a schedule, with a log of each run.
In ATX AnalyticsTable a schedule is set from a dialog — target, cadence, time zone, retries — and the preparation is a pipeline built from steps. Ask Greg can also propose the schedule and pipeline from a plain-language request.
Yes. ATX AnalyticsTable is installed on your own machines, its licence validates offline, and scheduled exports, PDFs and e-mails are produced locally.
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