How do I get a daily sales report by email?
Short answer
There are four routes, in rising order of effort. Your payment processor may offer a daily summary in its notification settings, which gives you a total and nothing else. A scheduled spreadsheet can pull the same figures and compare periods, but has to be built and maintained. A script on a cron job can email anything you want, at the cost of owning software whose failures are silent. A dedicated tool sends a briefing that also explains what changed and why — which is the part that makes a daily email worth opening rather than something you learn to ignore.
The four options, honestly
- Native notifications from your payment processor. Free, instant to set up, and usually just a total. Fine if all you want is a heartbeat.
- A scheduled spreadsheet. Flexible and cheap, but somebody has to build it, and it breaks quietly when an API or a column changes.
- A script on a cron job. Complete control, and now you own a piece of software whose failures are silent.
- A dedicated tool. Costs money, and should be earning it by doing more than reprinting a number you could already see.
What makes a daily email worth reading
A total on its own becomes wallpaper within a fortnight. There is nothing to react to, so people stop opening it — and then miss the day it mattered.
The useful version carries a comparison and an explanation: what the figure was, what it usually is, and which part of the funnel moved. That turns a notification into a decision.
What to look for whichever route you pick
- It arrives at a fixed local hour, not whenever a server in another timezone happens to run.
- It compares against something — the previous period, or what is normal for that weekday.
- It says when nothing happened, plainly, rather than manufacturing a finding to justify the send.
- It has a working unsubscribe, and switching it off does not also switch off alerts you deliberately set up.
The mistake to avoid
Sending it more often than you will act on it. An hourly revenue email trains you to ignore the channel entirely, and the ignoring carries over to the message that mattered.
Daily suits most businesses. Weekly suits one where a single day is too small to be readable, which is more of them than admit it.