Live reports in Timely

Let clients access the latest data by refreshing your reports

Lisa avatar
Written by Lisa
Updated over a week ago

Plans 💳 : Unlimited

User Permissions đŸ‘„: Admins, Managers, Employees

For legacy plans, please refer to the article here.
​
“Data-driven” is the buzzword of the decade and for good reason — given how quickly things move these days, ready access to information is crucial for every business.

That’s why you can now share live versions of Timely reports with clients and stakeholders. Simply send your clients your live public report link and they can check in on progress whenever they want. It helps everyone stay up-to-date without you needing to pull new reports every time your client gets curious.

Note: Live reports are only available on the Unlimited plan.

Create a live report

First, you’ll create a report as you normally would, gathering all the info you want your client to see on a regular basis. Just filter for the projects, tags or users that are specific to your client, department or team. Be sure to save your report before you share it — this saves you from creating the report from scratch later if you need to add or remove anything.

Note: If you have “Anyone” set for users, and “Any” set for projects and tags, any new project, user or tag added to the workspace or updated after publishing your report will automatically update on your shared report.

Once everything is set up, click “Share” and select “Live report”. You’ll also have the option to include individual time entries so that your clients can see, line-by-line, each hour you’ve logged for enhanced detail. When you’re ready, click “Preview and publish”:

Make sure that everything looks correct, click “Publish” and then copy your live report link to your clipboard to share it with your client. đŸ“©

Note: Live reports update upon refresh to show the latest available data, according to the date range, filters and widgets you’ve set. So each time a client accesses your link, they’ll be getting the latest information.

FAQs

I created a live report but it’s not updating to the current timeframe. What’s going on?

When you create a report, note that you’re creating a report for a specific date range, not a repeating timeframe. Let’s say you create a monthly report in October and set the date range from October 1st-31st. If you open that live report in November, you’ll still see the data for October. Having clear start and stop dates for live reports allows you to control the data you want to share with clients.

If you want stakeholders to be able to refresh the progress of a project across its lifetime, just set your live report timeframe to the day your project is due to end. That means selecting a date in the future as your report end point. You can also tailor the time range you want your chart to display to clients. From the Hours chart widget, just click the gear in the top-right corner, select the bar chart and then choose either a day, week, month or year view for data to roll on each time your client accesses your live report:

I just deleted the report from my Reports Dashboard. Does that also revoke access to the shared report?

Deleting the report itself doesn’t revoke access to the shared version. To do so, head to your Dashboard and scroll down to “Shared Reports”. Once you’ve found the report, click the “
” menu and “Revoke & Delete” to revoke access to the report. If you haven’t deleted the report yet, you’ll find the report’s name underneath the shared version it was based on. If you have deleted the report, that field will be blank, but you can still track a specific shared version down using the date you shared it and its status (live or snapshot).

Did this answer your question?