Datafor can bring numbers to people instead of waiting for them to open a report:

• A subscription sends a dashboard on a schedule: a screenshot, the key figures, optionally a PDF, Excel exports of tables and a short AI brief.
• A metric alert checks one measure on a schedule and sends a message only when a condition is met, for example Net Sales last month below 500,000 or Paid Orders down more than 10% on the previous month. It can add an AI breakdown of what drove the change.
• A paginated report subscription produces a paginated report as PDF, Excel, Word or CSV and sends the file. It is created in the paginated report viewer; see Paginated Report Subscriptions.

All three use the same recipients, the same delivery channels and the same message templates.

	Subscription	Metric alert
Sends	The dashboard, every time it runs	A message only when the condition is met (and again on recovery, if you ask for it)
Created from	Subscribe in the dashboard toolbar	Set alert in a chart's menu, or in a Metrics Library metric
Runs	Daily, on workdays, weekly, monthly, or only when you click Run now	Hourly, daily, weekly or monthly
Data shown to a person	That person's own data	The owner's data, the same for everyone
Managed in	My account › Subscriptions & alerts	My account › Subscriptions & alerts

The AI assistant inside a dashboard can also set either one up from a sentence such as send me this dashboard every Monday at 8 or tell me when net sales drop more than 10% month on month. It replies with a suggestion card; Create opens the normal editor with the fields filled in, and nothing is saved until you click Save.

How a run works

Whose data is in the message is the part to get right:

• A subscription sent to a person is rendered with that person's own permissions, row-level security included. Two people on the same subscription can receive different numbers. People with identical permissions share one render, which keeps large recipient lists fast; when a report's data depends on who is signed in (for example a SQL view that uses the login name), each person is rendered separately automatically.
• A subscription posted to a channel is rendered once with the owner's permissions, because a group chat has no single identity. Everyone in the channel sees what the owner sees. The editor tells you this when you add a channel.
• An alert is evaluated with the owner's permissions and gives one result for everyone. The message says so.

Recipients who could not see the data themselves are skipped, not given access: people who cannot open the report, and for alerts, people who cannot use the model. The editor lists them before you save.

How people receive messages

Recipients do not depend on the person who created the subscription for the delivery method. Each person chooses in My account › Subscriptions & alerts › How I receive: email, a direct message in an IM app the administrator has connected (Microsoft Teams, Slack, WeCom, DingTalk, Feishu), or both. People who never chose get the administrator's default, which is Email only unless it has been changed. If none of a person's chosen ways can reach them (for example they ticked Slack but are not linked to it), email is used instead.

Channels are different: a message posted to a Slack or Teams channel, or to a group robot (WeCom, DingTalk, Feishu) or webhook set up by an administrator, is one shared message.

Who can create what

User type	Subscriptions	Alerts
Administrator	Any number; any recipients, roles and channels	Any number
Creator	Up to 20 by default; any recipients and roles; only the channels an administrator has authorized	Up to 20 by default
Reader	Only for themselves, up to 5 by default; no channels	Only restricted alerts from a chart, sent to themselves, up to 5 by default

Administrators change these limits on the Subscriptions & alerts settings page. Everyone sees and manages only their own subscriptions and alerts; administrators see everyone's on that page.

What the server needs

The Subscribe button and Set alert appear once the subscriptions and alerts plugin is installed. Delivery then depends on a few settings, all described in Setting Up Delivery:

Needed for	Requirement
Email	A working mail server under Settings › Notifications › Email
Screenshots, PDF, Excel, figures and the AI brief	The render service, installed with the AI Agent. Without it a subscription still sends its message with the Open report link, but none of these. Alerts do not need it.
AI brief and AI analysis of alerts	The AI extension and a configured AI service, plus a daily budget above 0
IM direct messages and Slack or Teams channels	An app under Settings › Notifications › IM platforms, and people linked to it
Group robots and webhooks	A channel under Settings › Notifications › Delivery channels
Links that work outside the server	Settings › Access & Integration › Site address set to the address people use

Schedules, relative dates and alert periods all use one system time zone set by the administrator. Editors show the next run in that zone and add the offset, such as (UTC+08:00), when your browser is in a different one.

In this section

• Subscribing to a Dashboard
• Metric Alerts
• Managing Your Subscriptions and Alerts
• Setting Up Delivery (administrators)
• Monitoring and Limits (administrators)