How to Export and Schedule Shopify Reports for Your Team

To export a Shopify report, open it in the analytics area of the admin and use its export option, which gives you a file you can open in a spreadsheet. Getting the same report to the same people on a regular schedule is a separate job, done either by hand or with a reporting app that emails it for you. This guide covers who needs which report and how often, which file format suits which reader, how to set up scheduled reports so they stay useful, and how to keep everyone's numbers defined the same way.

Why export reports at all?

Because the person who needs the number is often not the person logged in to the admin. An accountant should not need staff access to your store to see last month's tax collected. Exports and scheduled emails put a specific, limited view in front of each reader, at the moment they need it.

The second reason is a record. A dashboard always shows the current view, and filters, settings and definitions change over time. A file saved at month end shows what you reported when you closed the month.

Who needs which report, and how often?

Start from the decision each person makes, and work back to the report.

The owner, weekly. One page: net sales against the monthly target, orders, average order value, top products, refund rate and, if you track it, net profit. The question it answers is whether the week went to plan and where to look if it did not.

Marketing, weekly. Sales and sessions by channel and campaign, new against returning customers, and the main landing pages. Weekly suits the pace at which budgets and creative get changed.

The accountant or bookkeeper, monthly. Sales with discounts, returns, shipping and tax shown separately; refunds; tax collected by jurisdiction; and sales by payment method to help reconcile payouts.

Operations, weekly or more often. Stock on hand, units sold by variant, and what needs reordering.

Resist adding more. A report nobody acts on trains people to ignore the ones that matter. If a recipient cannot say what they would do differently after reading it, stop sending it.

Which format should you use: CSV, Excel or PDF?

Choose by what the reader will do with the file.

• CSV is plain text with one row per line. Use it when the data is going into another system or will be combined with other data: accounting imports, a spreadsheet model, a database.
• Excel suits someone who will work on the numbers by hand and wants them to open cleanly, with columns recognised as numbers and dates.
• PDF is for reading, not reworking. Use it for the owner's weekly page or anything going to a board or investor, where the layout should arrive as you saw it.

One caution with CSV: spreadsheet programs like to 'help' when opening it. Postcodes and SKUs can lose their leading zeros, and long order numbers or dates can be reformatted. If an accountant reports odd values, the import settings on their side are the first thing to check, before the report itself.

How do you set up scheduled email reports?

Decide five things for each one, and write them down.

1. The recipients. Named people, as few as possible.
2. The cadence. Match it to a meeting or a task: Monday morning before the weekly review, the second working day of the month for the books.
3. The date range. Use a relative range, such as 'last week' or 'last month', so each send covers a complete period. A report covering a part-finished week invites wrong conclusions.
4. The format. As above, by reader.
5. The owner. One person responsible for the report being right and for retiring it when it is no longer needed.

Then review the list every few months. Remove people who have left or changed role, particularly from any report that contains customer details. Aggregated figures are safer to circulate than rows of names and addresses, so send totals unless the recipient needs the detail.

If you are choosing a tool for this, Marka Metrics exports every table to CSV on its free plan, adds Excel, PDF and JSON exports and scheduled email reports on its paid plans, and lets you build and save your own reports.

How do you keep definitions consistent?

By fixing four things once and never varying them between reports.

• The sales measure. Gross, net and total sales are different numbers. If the owner's report shows net sales and the marketing report shows total sales, the two will never agree and someone will lose a morning finding out why. Our guide to gross, net and total sales explains each; pick one as the house figure and name it in the column heading.
• The time zone and the week. Reports follow the store's time zone. Agree whether your week starts on Sunday or Monday and use the same boundary everywhere.
• The filters. Decide whether test orders, wholesale or point-of-sale orders are in or out, and apply the same choice to every report that claims to show 'sales'.
• The source. Save a report once and schedule that saved version. Rebuilding it by hand each time is how filters drift.

A simple example shows the cost of getting this wrong. Say a week has $20,000 in gross sales, $1,500 in discounts and $500 in returns, with $1,200 of shipping and $2,000 of tax. Net sales are $18,000 and total sales are $21,200. Two people quoting 'sales for the week' can be $3,200 apart and both be right.

Put the definitions in the report itself. A line at the top, such as 'Net sales, store time zone, excludes wholesale', saves every reader from guessing.

A short checklist

1. List each reader, the decision they make and the one report that serves it.
2. Send owners and marketing weekly, accountants monthly.
3. Use CSV for systems, Excel for analysis and PDF for reading.
4. Schedule with relative date ranges that cover complete periods.
5. Fix one sales measure, one time zone and one set of filters.
6. Review recipients and retire unread reports every few months.

Exports and scheduled reports are one of the things to look for in any analytics tool, as our guide to Shopify analytics beyond the built-in reports explains. To export any table and have reports arrive by email on a schedule, see Marka Metrics.