Stop 07 · BI Tools & DashboardsTopics · 8/9

Scheduling Refreshes & Sharing Reports

In short

A dashboard you refresh by hand every morning becomes your new full-time job. Scheduled refresh and proper sharing make it run without you, for exactly the right people.

Setting a dashboard to automatically pull fresh data on a schedule, and sharing it with the right audience with the right permissions — turning a one-off build into a living report.

The jaadu rides a bicycle and tosses a rolled newspaper onto a doorstep.

Think of it like this

The morning newspaper

The paper lands at your door every morning without you calling the office. It's printed overnight, delivered on a schedule, and only subscribers get it. A refreshed, shared report works the same way: updated on a timetable, delivered to the right list.

Watch it happen

What happens at 6 AM every day

BI service

Gateway

Database

Viewers

06:00 refresh starts

1/5The schedule fires. Pick a time after the source data has finished loading overnight.

The big ideas

What you need to know

Refresh after the source

If the warehouse loads at 5 AM, refresh at 6. Refreshing earlier just copies yesterday's stale data.

Watch for failures

Turn on failure notifications. A silent failed refresh means people act on old numbers.

Share with groups

Give access to groups like 'Sales Managers', not one person at a time. Joiners and leavers get handled automatically.

Row-level security

One report, filtered per viewer, so a regional manager sees only their region's rows.

Save yourself the pain

Common mistakes

Oops

Emailing exported Excel files of the dashboard every Monday.

Do this instead

Share the live report and set up a subscription. One source of truth, always current.

Oops

Showing no 'last refreshed' time on the report.

Do this instead

Add a visible last refresh timestamp so people know how fresh the numbers are.

Your mission

Make it run without you

~20 min

Quick check

Your warehouse finishes loading at 5:30 AM. When should the dashboard refresh run?

Go deeper

1Learn how scheduled refresh works in your chosen BI tool's cloud service.
2Practice setting sharing permissions (view-only vs edit access).
3Understand common refresh failure causes (credential expiry, source schema changes).