Power BI ‘Subscribe to email’ — Use Cases

Pros and cons of the Subscribe to email feature in Power BI

Distributing Power BI reports and dashboards to end-users is a common requirement in many scenarios. Businesses routinely need to deliver standard reports to internal and external users — employees, customers and vendors. The generation and distribution of these reports needs to be automated and based on a schedule or a trigger event.

To achieve this, Power BI lets users schedule and subscribe to reports and dashboards from Power BI Service, which is documented at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/consumer/end-user-subscribe. Every subscriber to a report or dashboard needs a Power BI license (Pro, PPU or Power BI Premium). With this, users get the selected report page embedded in an email along with a link to the online report.

This works for simple use cases when users only need to view a single page of a report or when all recipients can view identical information (one set of slicers and filters applied to a subscription). At the other end, it’s a great feature for users who want to access their reports online and use the full analytical capabilities of Power BI.

However, in our experience with designing and building Power BI reports for businesses over the last five years, there are many instances where the report distribution needs are somewhere in between these two ends. In such cases, the Subscribe feature has many limitations.

1. Power BI reports are often multi-page. Having to subscribe to them one page at a time just doesn’t work.

2. Report bursting is a common need. End-users need to see only their data, rather than the output of a standard report template. Example: Company A needs to send 3-page KPI reports to its 50 sales managers every week. Each sales manager must receive a report copy filtered on their unique KPI data. This is not possible with Power BI Subscribe unless you create 50 copies of the report on Power BI Service and subscribe them individually to the sales managers. Creating and managing this manually is extremely expensive and error-prone.

3. End-users (like the sales managers in our previous example) are busy people. They often do not have the time to log in to Power BI to run detailed analyses on their data. All they need is a PDF delivered in their email, which they can quickly review with their teams or managers. In such cases, opening multiple emails for a multi-page report and paying for a Power BI license makes the Subscribe feature both expensive and inefficient.

4. Another widespread need is for reports to be delivered to external users. Example: An IT infrastructure services company needs to send standard monthly performance reports covering Help Desk, Infosec and Assets Managed to its top 200 clients. It uses these reports to anchor its monthly reviews with clients. As in the previous example, end-users (client IT managers) don’t have the time to log in to Power BI to analyze their reports. Instead, they prefer to review a PDF report and then use the monthly calls to flag action / problem areas. Paying for Power BI licenses and setting up Azure Active Directory access for 200 external users makes the process expensive and tedious.

5. There are restrictions on the number of subscriptions per report, PDF file size and on-demand report delivery. In summary, while the Subscribe feature works in some situations, it leaves many use cases unfulfilled. It is also largely manual, which means upfront and recurring costs.

These gaps are addressed by several third-party applications that are designed specifically for report generation and distribution. They address the above limitations of Power BI Subscribe in different ways and provide other customizations.

BI Helper

BI Helper bihelper.tech is a simple, secure and cost effective SaaS solution for PDF report distribution in Tableau and Power BI. You only need a single Power BI / Tableau license to generate your PDF reports.

Resource: BI Helper Tutorial | Report Distribution in BI Tools