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How to create and manage scheduled refreshes in Google Sheets

Use scheduled report refreshes to automatically update and share reports by email. Supermetrics will refresh and send reports following the rules you establish in triggers — these define what reporting should be updated, and where it should be sent when it's ready.


If you set up a scheduled refresh, Supermetrics will update data in the entire file with every refresh.


Most Supermetrics licenses support scheduled refreshes that can be set to trigger once a day or once a week. Licenses purchased with our sales team can support refreshes every hour. Contact us to learn more.


Instructions


Set up a scheduled refresh
  1. Open the Supermetrics sidebar in Google Sheets.
  2. Click the Schedule tab at the top of the sidebar.
  3. Click Add trigger
  4. Choose the options you’d like for your scheduled refreshes. This includes email settings, like whether or not you’d like to be notified if a refresh fails.


Your license determines how frequently you can refresh your reports. If your license supports one refresh per day, for instance, and you schedule more than one, only the first one will run.

Make changes to a trigger

After you’ve added multiple triggers, you can manage them all at once by opening the Schedule tab and clicking Manage triggers in all your files at the bottom of the sidebar. This will show all of your triggers, when they were created and last refreshed, as well as their current status.


Click on any trigger to start making changes to it.


Timezone

When you create a trigger, it will default to using the timezone setting in the Sheets file.


If you change the file’s timezone, you’ll need to delete and re-add any triggers that you want to run in the new timezone. If you don’t update them, they’ll continue to use the file’s old timezone.

Transfer a trigger from one user to another

If you want to transfer triggers from another user or your own old user ID to the Google Account that’s currently logged in, transfer the trigger’s ownership in the Sheets file.

  1. In the Supermetrics sidebar, navigate to the Schedule tab. 
  2. Hover your mouse over the icon next to the trigger you want to transfer. You’ll see the trigger’s current owner. 
  3. Click Transfer to me to transfer the trigger ownership to your current user account.


Best practices

Following these best practices when setting your triggers up should help keep them running reliably.


 You can view all of your triggers — including their status and when they were last refreshed — by clicking the Schedule tab in the sidebar and scrolling down to Manage triggers in all your files.


Keep the trigger count low

It’s best to keep the number of triggers per file as low as possible. Ideally, this means 1 or 2 triggers per file. Supermetrics has a hard limit of 5 triggers per file to maintain their reliability. We recommend breaking data into separate files if you need more triggers.


It’s a good idea to keep the number of triggers per account below 50. Having 100 or more can cause refreshes to fail.


Avoid running too many triggers in the same hour

A Google AppScript limitation means that the default trigger system can only handle about 6 minutes per account per hour, so if it can’t complete the triggers in that 6 minutes, the refresh will get pushed out. This can cause reliability issues. 


To help with this, avoid setting too many triggers to run at the same time, and if you can, spread non-key triggers out to off-hours (like after work, or at night).



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