Twenty-one months, one click at a time
This example is illustrative. It follows how a store manager used dassi to build an archive of two years of monthly reports, with the details changed.
Most reporting portals will show you any month you like and export it as a PDF. Very few will give you all of them at once. So the archive for a budget meeting or a new manager’s first week gets built by hand: pick the month, wait for the report, find the save icon, choose PDF, go back, pick the next month.
The instruction on this page describes those clicks for one month and asks for all of them. dassi read the Period dropdown, found 21 months, and worked through the list.
Eighteen came down as PDFs. Two months rendered a page that said no data was available, and dassi exported nothing for those. One export hung. It tried again, the second attempt hung too, and that month went on the list for a person to run.
Then the next report
The useful part came after. With the first report done, the follow-up instructions were short: now the expense report, same months. Now the inventory summary. Now call stats, new and used. In the usage behind this page, about fifteen different reports were archived this way over one evening, each from a one-line instruction.
Reports that come by email work the same way. If a forecast file arrives from the same two senders at the end of every month, dassi can search the mailbox, open each message and download the attachment.
Things to check
Look at the file list before you close the tab. Portals often name every export the same thing, and your browser adds a number to tell them apart. dassi’s list says which file was which month, but it’s quicker to rename them while that list is in front of you.
Open three of the PDFs. A report that rendered before a filter finished applying looks complete and has the wrong numbers. If your report has a filter that resets on each period, such as a model-year selector, tell dassi to set it every time. The manager in this example had to rerun one report for that reason.
Limits
The browser stays open for the whole run, and it’s busy while dassi works in that tab. Twenty-one exports took about half an hour in this example. Most of that was the portal rendering.
dassi doesn’t choose where files are saved. They go wherever your browser puts downloads.
If the portal requires a fresh sign-in or a verification code partway through, you do that part.