The real risk in a daily report is not that nobody produces it. It is that **it comes out wrong and nobody notices**. Source headers get renamed, columns get inserted, dates get shifted forward — and a report full of zeros looks exactly as tidy as a correct one.
The definitions usually sit in a long-lived spreadsheet, and only its author knows why a given column is calculated that way. When that person is away the line stops, or whoever picks it up produces a different number.
Departmental sheets are written for people: a column gets added, a header gets renamed, the dates start a few days earlier. A script that reads by position does not error on any of that — it quietly produces a wrong report.
Collect, align, apply formulas, paste into the template, post to the group. None of it is hard, but it happens every day and has to be finished before people start work.
The scheduled run happens at night, out of everyone's way. If a sheet cannot be fetched it raises that, rather than carrying yesterday's numbers forward.
Definitions are delivered per organization instead of hiding in someone's workbook. Correct one once and every run after that uses it.
Columns are matched by name, tolerant of stray spaces and small renames. When a match genuinely fails it **stops and asks** instead of producing a sheet of zeros, and a shifted date range is reported as an anomaly.
The report goes out with the period's anomalies attached, anomalies first — what looks wrong before what the numbers say.
Columns match by name and tolerate whitespace and small renames. When a match genuinely fails it stops and asks. That is deliberate: silently degrading into a wrong report is far more dangerous than producing no report.
No. Source sheets are read-only and only a copy of the report is written. That is a hard constraint, not a setting.
Multi-sheet joins, cross-sheet lookups and dimensional allocation are all in scope. At delivery the definitions of your existing sheet are calibrated item by item, and matching that sheet is the acceptance test.