Product
Where your reports should land: Sheets, Drive, and Shopify Flow
A scheduled report is only as useful as the place it arrives — so pick the destination by what someone does next, not by what was easiest to tick.
A destination is a decision, not a checkbox
Most schedules get their destination by accident. Email-me-a-CSV is the first option anyone reaches for, it works on the first try, and it never gets revisited. But the delivery channel is the part of a schedule that decides whether the numbers get used or just get received.
The question worth asking before you save is narrow: what is the first thing someone does after they read this? Not what the report is about — what happens in the ten minutes after it lands. Assisty's Scheduled Reports offers four destinations — email, Google Sheets, Google Drive, and a Shopify Flow trigger — and choosing between them is really choosing who touches the numbers next, and with what.
Email deserves a defence before it gets demoted. It's universal, it needs no login, it's searchable years later, and it reaches people outside your Shopify org — a 3PL contact, an accountant, a supplier rep. Assisty's email delivery carries a CSV, Excel, or PDF attachment to multiple recipients at once, which is exactly right when the next step is reading.
It's the wrong choice when the next step is work. A file in an inbox is a snapshot — the moment it lands it stops being current, and next week's copy stacks below it as a second snapshot rather than replacing the first. Reports sent by email with adoption merely hoped for quietly go unread; the ones that stick are the ones embedded where the decision already happens.
Pick the destination by what happens next
Four plausible next-steps map cleanly onto the four destinations. Read it and file it → email. Edit it, filter it, add a column of your own → Google Sheets. Keep it as a record you may have to produce later → Google Drive. Act on it without anyone opening it → Shopify Flow.
The choice belongs to the schedule, not to the report. A schedule captures the report exactly as it sits on screen — breakdown, time range, filters, columns — but its own columns and filters can then be edited without changing the source report anyone else uses, and nothing stops the same report from being scheduled more than once a day. So one saved report can back a wide weekly sheet for the planner and a narrow daily trigger for the ops channel, without forking the report itself.
| Destination | Send here when the next step is… | What the recipient actually does | Where the numbers live afterward |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reading and filing — including by people outside the store's apps | Opens a CSV, Excel, or PDF attachment; multiple recipients get the same one | In the inbox, as a snapshot per run — plus in the schedule's run history | |
| Google Sheets | Editing — filtering, annotating, adding a column of your own | Works in a sheet the team already opens, or in a fresh one synced per run | In the synced sheet, or appended to yours as a growing log |
| Google Drive | Keeping the file — the artifact matters later, not just the figure | Finds the file where the team already keeps its files | In your Drive folder, alongside every other record |
| Shopify Flow | Acting — someone should be told, or a system should be fed | Nothing: a Flow trigger fires and alerts Slack or Teams, or pushes to the ERP | Wherever Flow sent it — plus in the run history with the file that was sent |
Google Sheets: when the report is the start of the work, not the end
Spreadsheets are still where operational work actually gets done. In a 2018 Adelante SCM survey of 140 executives commissioned by BluJay Solutions, 67.4% named Excel spreadsheets as a supply-chain management tool they used — a habit worth routing into rather than fighting.
Assisty's Sheets delivery gives you two shapes of that, and the distinction is the whole decision: a schedule can sync a fresh Google Sheet, or append to the one your team already lives in.
A synced sheet holds the current picture — choose it when the question is "what does it look like right now?" An appended sheet accumulates history — each run adds to a growing log, so you can see how a number moved week over week without hunting down last month's file. Choose it when the question is "is this getting better or worse?" Picking the wrong one is how a sheet ends up either missing the trend you wanted or bloating into something nobody can read.
Shopify Flow: when the answer should trigger an action, not a read
The other three destinations all end with a person opening something. Flow delivery doesn't. The schedule fires a Shopify Flow trigger, and Flow does the rest — alerting Slack or Teams, or pushing the data into your ERP. (The schedule's job ends at the trigger; the alerting happens on the Flow side, not straight from the schedule.)
What you're buying here is time-to-notice. A report that lands in a folder is only as fast as the next person who opens the folder. A report that fires a trigger arrives in the channel where the team is already talking, at the moment it ran.
That speed is also the reason to be deliberate about quiet runs. You can choose whether an empty run still sends — and a trigger destination is exactly where the choice bites, because an alert that fires on nothing a few weeks running is an alert people learn to scroll past.
Google Drive, and why the file itself matters later
Drive is the destination for reports where the file is the point. A month-end stock position, a supplier-facing summary, an inventory snapshot you may need to reconcile against six months from now — the schedule drops the file where you already keep your files, so it's filed at the moment it's produced rather than whenever someone remembers to save an attachment.
You have a second copy regardless of destination: every run is kept in history with the exact file it sent, re-downloadable any time. And before you trust any of it, Run now sends a test delivery the moment you save.
None of this depends on how the report was built. A report you got by asking Assisty's AI Report Builder in plain English saves into My Reports and schedules like any other report there. And a report doesn't have to pick one destination for good — the same report can be scheduled more than once, and each schedule chooses where it goes.