# Salesforce schedule report: the three Monday subscriptions and the running-user trap

https://salesbond.app/blog/salesforce-schedule-report-subscription/
Published: 2026-10-22 · Updated: 2026-10-22

To schedule a Salesforce report in Lightning, open the report, click Subscribe, set the frequency, day and time, add the recipients, and choose who the report runs as. That last choice decides what everyone receives: the email is built with the running user’s access, not the recipient’s. A sales manager needs three weekly subscriptions, all landing on Monday morning: open deals with a close date in the past, open deals with no next step, and deals closed last week.

## Schedule or subscribe? In Lightning it is one button

Lightning has no separate “schedule report” screen. The schedule lives inside the subscription, so “schedule it” and “subscribe to it” mean the same button. Salesforce Classic is different: there you open the report, click Run Report and pick Schedule Future Runs. Most step-by-step answers online still describe that Classic menu.

The Lightning path ( [Databox guide](https://databox.com/how-to-schedule-report-salesforce)):

1. Open the Reports tab and click the report, or open the row menu next to it.
2. Click Subscribe. The Edit Subscription window opens.
3. On the Schedule tab, pick Daily, Weekly or Monthly. Weekly gives you a button per weekday and a time.
4. Add the recipients and set Run Report As.
5. Save.

A dashboard subscription is a separate thing. It refreshes the dashboard on a schedule and can email you the result ( [Sage People help](https://help-people.sage.com/Content/SP_Analytics/ReportsDashboards/SP_ANL_RD_ReportSubscriptions.htm)). The practical difference is charts: emailed reports don’t contain charts, so a chart you want in the inbox has to come from a dashboard ( [Databox](https://databox.com/how-to-schedule-report-salesforce)). Which components deserve that slot is in [the Salesforce dashboard a sales manager actually uses](https://salesbond.app/blog/salesforce-dashboard-sales-manager-components/). For the Monday routine below plain rows are fine. A list of slipped deals reads better as a table than as a bar.

You can also attach the data as an.xlsx or.csv file, up to 10 MB ( [Databox](https://databox.com/how-to-schedule-report-salesforce)). We skip the attachment on Monday. The point is to read, not to download.

## The three reports a manager wants on Monday

Build the reports first, then subscribe. How to build each one is in [the Salesforce reports a sales manager opens on Monday](https://salesbond.app/blog/salesforce-reports-sales-manager-weekly/); here we only care about which three get an email.

1. **Close date in the past.** Open opportunities, Close Date less than today. Every row is a deal a rep forgot to push or to close. This one goes to the manager only.
2. **No next step.** Open opportunities where Next Step is blank. It goes to the manager and to the reps, because the fix is a field a rep fills in before the pipeline call, not a conversation.
3. **Closed last week.** Close Date in last week, both won and lost. This is the one report that should arrive even when it is empty.

Set all three to Weekly, Monday, early enough to land before the pipeline call. Order matters more than it sounds. The manager reads the past-close-date list first, because that is where the [weekly pipeline inspection](https://salesbond.app/blog/salesforce-pipeline-inspection-weekly-review/) starts.

## Running user: whose view are you emailing

The running user is the person whose access Salesforce uses to build the email. You set it in the Run Report As field, and most people leave it on the default, which is you. Every recipient gets the same rows as that user, and date filters follow that user’s time zone ( [SimplySfdc](https://www.simplysfdc.com/2022/04/salesforce-subscribe-report.html)). So recipients can see more than they normally would, or less ( [Craftsman Technology Group](https://www.craftsmantech.com/2019/03/15/reports-share-subscribe/)).

We’ve seen this go wrong in two ways. An admin subscribes the whole team to “No next step” and leaves the running user on themselves: every rep now gets every other rep’s deals, including the ones sharing rules were built to hide. Or a rep sets up the manager’s subscription from their own account, and the manager gets one rep’s pipeline and reads it as the team.

![Diagram: one report sent to three recipients, all receiving the rows of the user chosen in Run Report As](https://salesbond.app/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/salesforce-schedule-report-subscription-2.png)

Our rule is boring on purpose. The Monday subscriptions are created from the manager’s own account and run as the manager. A team subscription running as an admin is a sharing leak with a schedule attached. Picking Another Person as the running user needs the permission “Subscribe to Reports: Set Running User” ( [Sage People help](https://help-people.sage.com/Content/SP_Analytics/ReportsDashboards/SP_ANL_RD_ReportSubscriptions.htm)), and most reps don’t have it, which is the right default.

## Empty-report emails and how to avoid them

Add a condition to the subscription: Record Count greater than 0, and the email goes out only when the report has rows. The setting sits in the Conditions section of the Edit Subscription window. Each condition is an aggregate, an operator and a value; Record Count is always available as the aggregate, and one subscription holds up to five conditions ( [Sage People help](https://help-people.sage.com/Content/SP_Analytics/ReportsDashboards/SP_ANL_RD_ReportSubscriptions.htm)). Admins regularly go looking for a paid add-on to get “send only if there are records”, when the subscription window already has it.

Put the condition on the first two Monday reports. Leave the third one without it. An empty “Closed last week” email is the clearest signal a manager gets all week.

Since we are on tooling anyway: we build SalesBond, a sales management layer on top of the CRM a team already uses. We started with Pipedrive, and it works with Salesforce, HubSpot and Zoho CRM. It is one way to get the Monday list of slipped and silent deals without a subscription per report. The three subscriptions above cost nothing extra and take a few minutes, so start there, and [check your CRM with SalesBond](https://salesbond.app/) when the list needs reasons attached to it.

## Who owns the Monday email, and what breaks it

Each user can subscribe to seven reports, and being added as a recipient by someone else does not count against that limit ( [SimplySfdc](https://www.simplysfdc.com/2022/04/salesforce-subscribe-report.html); the [Sage People help](https://help-people.sage.com/Content/SP_Analytics/ReportsDashboards/SP_ANL_RD_ReportSubscriptions.htm) gives the same seven, plus seven for dashboards). Three Monday reports leave room for a few more. On the Reports tab, the Subscribed column shows a checkmark only on reports you subscribed to yourself, which is also how you find out who owns the Monday email: if your row has no checkmark, someone else set it up.

That ownership matters when people move. A subscription is tied to the person who created it, so before it’s creator leaves, usually the manager, recreate the three subscriptions from the successor’s account instead of hoping the old ones keep running.

The folder is the other weak point. Recipients need access to the folder the report sits in, and a report in Private Reports can’t be sent to anyone else ( [SimplySfdc](https://www.simplysfdc.com/2022/04/salesforce-subscribe-report.html)). Keep the three Monday reports in a shared folder named for the team, not in someone’s private folder.

## Who can subscribe other people, and what about Classic

Not everyone. Adding other recipients needs the permission “Subscribe to Reports: Add Recipients”, and sending to public groups or roles needs “Subscribe Reports: Send to Groups and Roles”. A group or role subscription sends at most 500 emails, and the folder has to be shared with that user, role or group first ( [Sage People help](https://help-people.sage.com/Content/SP_Analytics/ReportsDashboards/SP_ANL_RD_ReportSubscriptions.htm)). We keep both permissions with managers and admins, which keeps the inbox of the the team from filling up with reports nobody asked for.

If your org still runs Classic, the scheduling lives under Run Report, then Schedule Future Runs, and you finish with Save Report Schedule ( [Databox](https://databox.com/how-to-schedule-report-salesforce)). Everything in this article, the condition and the running user included, is written for the Lightning Subscribe window. Open it on your “Close date in the past” report this week and set the first subscription before Monday.