A scheduled CSV export for your accountant (or your donor report)

Most stores owe someone a regular spreadsheet: month-end stock figures for the finance officer, or the numbers behind a quarterly report to a funder. Building it by hand each time is slow and easy to get wrong. OpenBoxes Lift's scheduled CSV export builds a zip of your report data every day, week or month and emails the people who asked for it a link to download it. It is included on every plan (Shared, Dedicated and Enterprise), with no add-on to buy and no API key.

This article covers what arrives, how to set it up, how to get it to an accountant, and what it will and will not do for a donor report. The reference is in the docs: Scheduled CSV export.

What arrives#

Each export is one zip with seven CSV files, plus a manifest.json that describes each file for software and a README.txt that describes them for people:

• Summary: the Reports page tiles, one row.
• Stock on hand: one row per product at each location.
• Stock history: one row per product, location and day checked, for the export's period.
• Stock value history: the value of your stock, one row per day for the last 90 days and one per month before that.
• Expiring lots: lots expiring within the window you set in the Stock alerts panel.
• Open purchase orders: one row per open order and currency.
• Activity: stock movements per product, location, day and category (received, issued, consumed, expired, damaged, adjusted and so on) for the export's period.

Stock on hand, expiring lots and the summary come from the most recent daily check, normally that morning's. Every file is in the zip even when it has no rows, so a file layout you build around it will not break in a quiet month.

Setting it up#

1. In the portal, open Integrations, then Reporting, then Scheduled CSV export (the tile's button is Open Scheduled CSV export). The Reports page links to it too.
2. The account owner or an admin switches on Build a scheduled export for this account and chooses how often:
   • Daily: every morning, covering the day before.
   • Weekly: every Monday, covering Monday to Sunday of the week before.
   • Monthly: on the 1st, covering the month before.
3. Each person who wants the email turns it on for themselves with Send me the export. The account owner can also turn it on for a teammate with Send them the export, except for someone who turned it off themselves.

Exports are built from 07:00 in your instance's timezone (the one set under Settings, General), normally after that morning's daily stock check. You cannot choose the time; the panel's Next export line shows when the next one is due. There is one schedule per account.

For month-end figures, Monthly is the natural choice: the export on the 1st covers the whole of the month before.

Getting it to your accountant#

Three details matter here.

It only goes to people on your team. The export cannot be sent to an outside address, a shared mailbox, Slack, Microsoft Teams or a webhook, because the files hold your own data, including supplier names and order numbers. To send it to an accountant, invite them to your team from Users in the portal, and then they (or the account owner) turn the email on for them. They count as one of your plan's users, like any teammate (see Managing users).

The file is never attached. The email has a Download from the portal button. Each download checks that the person is still on your team, so forwarding the email does not pass the file on, and someone removed from the team cannot download from that moment. Each export can be downloaded for 7 days after it is built, then it is deleted. If your accountant works on the numbers later in the month, they should download the file when it arrives.

Money columns depend on who downloads. Stock values, prices and order amounts are filled in for the account owner and admins. Everyone else gets the same files with those cells empty, unless the account owner switches on Show stock and order values to all teammates on the Reports page. The choice is made for each person at the moment they download. So decide how your accountant will see values before the first month-end: give them the Admin role, or use that switch. In the portal, the Admin role sees stock and order values on the Reports page, in these exports and in the weekly stock summary, and can change or switch off this schedule; it does not let them invite or remove teammates or manage billing. The switch shows values to every teammate, not only to your accountant.

What the stock value is#

The value in these files is a quantity multiplied by each product's price per unit in OpenBoxes, both taken on the most recent day prices were checked, and it has no currency symbol. It is not a costing method such as FIFO or weighted average. Before it goes into your accounts, agree with your accountant what that price represents in your OpenBoxes data and how it is kept up to date.

Figures can move after the fact#

Activity for the last 8 days can still change when entries are edited, added late or backdated in OpenBoxes. Each file is correct as of the day it was built, and a later export or the Reports page shows the updated figures. If you close the books from a monthly export, keep that file as the record and note that a later download may differ slightly.

Using it for a donor or program report#

The export gives you the raw material for a lot of program reporting: quantities received, issued and consumed by product and location, losses to expiry and damage, stock on hand at each site and lots close to expiry.

What it does not do is split any of that by donor or funding source. There is no donor or grant column in any of the seven files. If a funder wants figures for only the stock they paid for, plan how you will tell that stock apart before you rely on the export, and check that your plan works with the columns the files actually have (the Reporting API field reference lists every one).

A few practical points:

• Open the files in Excel with Data, then From Text/CSV, rather than double-clicking, so names with accents display correctly.
• Choose the period to match the report. A weekly export covers exactly Monday to Sunday; a monthly one covers exactly the calendar month.
• Looker Studio can use the files by hand: download an export and add a CSV file with Google's own CSV file upload. Nothing refreshes by itself. See Looker Studio.

What it is not#

• Not a backup, and not a full export of your data. It is seven report datasets from the daily check. Backups of your instance are separate; see Backups.
• Not on demand. There is no export-now button. For a file straight away, use the CSV download on each card of the Reports page.
• Not configurable per file or per location. Every export holds all seven files for the whole account.
• No failure email. If an export cannot be built, nothing is sent, and the panel's Recent exports list says what happened. Glance at it if an expected email does not arrive.

If you want the same figures refreshing inside Power BI or Excel instead of arriving as files, the Power Query recipe reads the same seven datasets with an API key.

Summary#

• The scheduled CSV export emails a portal link to a zip of seven report datasets, daily, weekly or monthly, on every plan.
• An accountant has to be on your team to receive it, should download within 7 days, and sees money columns only as an admin or when values are shown to all teammates.
• The stock value is quantity times the price per unit in OpenBoxes, not an accounting valuation.
• It has no donor or funding-source dimension, and it is not a backup.

Everything else that connects to OpenBoxes Lift is on Integrations, and what each plan includes is on Pricing.