Scheduling Background Reports​

You can schedule a report to run in the background at set times and at regular intervals. When a scheduled report is ready, you receive an email notification. You can view report results by logging in and opening or downloading the report results and viewing them in a spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Excel.

You can instruct SAP Ariba to attach the report to email notification; recipients can then view the report without having to log in.

​​Use scheduled reporting to:

• ​Take data snapshots—scheduled reports can be stored, so you can use them to compare periodic snapshots of your data.​
• Send reports to recipients—you can share scheduled reports with other stakeholders and project members. The recipients you specify can be other SAP Ariba users or people with external email addresses. You and other recipients can then use the same data snapshot for collaborative projects or tracking purposes.
• ​​You cannot schedule reports that use a custom export template.

Scheduling options:

• Run immediately or in the future
• ​Run regularly on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis​
• Number of days to retain data
• ​Select users to notify or enter email addresses of external users
• ​Attach report to email notification

Administrators can view all scheduled reports within the system.​

Scheduled reports which are sent by email use a different template than the Excel Export functionality.

If you schedule the report to run once, the screen refreshes and prompts you to input the number of days to keep the stored results. If you schedule the report to run repeatedly, the screen refreshes and prompts you to input the number of report runs to keep. Each iteration of the report results are identified with the date and time it ran. ​

Scheduled report run times are approximate. The time the report is actually run depends on the number of reports all users in the system have scheduled to run at a given time. Each newly scheduled report is added to a queue. Therefore, it’s possible that your report may run after its scheduled report time. ​

When you schedule a report to run in the background, it will run even if you are not logged into the SAP Ariba system at the time. A benefit to scheduling a report to run in the future is that it will run using the data available at that time. For example, you can schedule the report to run at the end of every month to capture the latest information. ​

When the report has finished running, you will receive an email notification from the system. You can log into the system to view the results. If you selected the option to have the report emailed to you as a zip file, you can also open the zip file to view the results. When viewing the results in the system, you still have the ability to filter and drill down, but you cannot move fields between page, columns, and rows, nor can you add new fields. This is because you are looking at static data - a snapshot of data at the time the report was run - rather than a live report.​​

• You can set reports to run in the background while you work on other tasks in the system
• This functionality has several potential use cases:​
  • Long running reports might slow your work down
  • ​You might wish to save a snapshot of data
  • ​It can simplify the process of sending reports to stakeholders
• You can store up to 5 runs of a background report
• Reports can be scheduled to run immediately, once at a future point, or on a recurring schedule, such as weekly
• Results can be emailed to a list of SAP Ariba users and/or email addresses​