How to Subscribe to Power BI Report

Tired of manually checking your Power BI reports for updates every morning? You can get your key insights delivered directly to your email inbox automatically. This guide will walk you through exactly how to create, manage, and customize email subscriptions for your Power BI reports and dashboards, step-by-step.

What Exactly is a Power BI Subscription?

In Power BI, a "subscription" is an automated email feature that sends a snapshot of a report page or a dashboard directly to you and your colleagues. Think of it as setting up a newspaper delivery, but for your business data. Instead of logging into the Power BI service every day to see your sales figures or marketing performance, Power BI emails you an image of the report, a PDF copy, and a link back to the live version on a schedule you define.

This is incredibly useful for:

Monday Morning Briefings: Get a summary of last week’s performance in your inbox before your first meeting.
Daily KPI Tracking: Keep a constant eye on key metrics without having to actively pull them up.
Sharing with Stakeholders: Automatically send high-level summaries to execs or clients who don't need real-time access but want to stay informed.

It streamlines the process of staying updated, ensuring that you and your team are always looking at the most relevant data at the right time.

Before You Start: Prerequisites for Subscriptions

Before you get started, there are a few requirements you need to have in place. It's good to confirm these first to save yourself some troubleshooting time later.

Power BI License: You need a Power BI Pro or a Premium Per User (PPU) license. Subscriptions are not available on the free license tier.
Viewing Permissions: You must have permission to view the specific report or dashboard you want to subscribe to. If you want to subscribe other people, you'll need edit permissions.
Premium Capacity Workspace: The report or dashboard must be located in a workspace that is backed by a Power BI Premium capacity. This is what unlocks more advanced features like sending full attachments. Your Power BI admin can confirm this for you.
Data Source Supported: Most data sources work, but subscriptions on reports with live connections to some sources, like Azure Analysis Services or SQL Server Analysis Services, require specific configurations.
No Weird Characters: Subscription emails may fail if the report or dashboard name contains special characters. Stick to standard letters and numbers if you run into trouble.

If you check all these boxes, you're ready to create your subscription!

How to Subscribe Yourself to a Power BI Report (Step-by-Step)

Setting up a personal subscription is straightforward. This will deliver the report updates right to your own email address.

Step 1: Open the Report

First, navigate to the workspace that contains the report you want to track and click to open it in the Power BI Service.

Step 2: Choose "Subscribe to report"

In the menu bar at the top of the report view, you'll see a row of icons. Look for the envelope icon labeled "Subscribe to report" and click it.

Step 3: Create a New Subscription

A pane will slide out from the right side of your screen. Click the big blue button that says + Add new subscription. This will open up the configuration options.

Step 4: Configure Your Subscription Details

This is where you tell Power BI exactly what you want, when you want it, and how you want it delivered. Let's break down each option:

Name and Recipients

First, give your subscription a descriptive name in the "Subscription name" field, like "Daily Sales Summary" or "Weekly Marketing KPIs." By default, it subscribes your email address. You will have the option to add others if you have the right permissions, which we’ll cover later.

Email Details

You can customize the email subject and write a short message. This is helpful for providing context, for example: "Hi team, here is the weekly look at our campaign performance. Please review before our Monday sync."

Content and Attachments

Report Page: Use the dropdown to select the specific report page you want to see. By default, it selects the page you're currently viewing, but you can choose any page from the report.
Preview Image (Optional): Toggling this on includes an image of the report page in the body of the email itself.
Link to report in Power BI (Optional): This is highly recommended. It adds a button to the email that takes you directly to the live, interactive report.
Full Report Attachment: This is a powerful feature for Premium workspaces. You can choose to attach the entire report (or just the selected page) as a PDF or PowerPoint file. This is perfect for archiving reports or sharing them with people who just need a static copy.

Step 5: Subscription Schedule

Under the "Schedule" section, you'll define the delivery cadence:

Frequency: Choose how often you get the email. The options are Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or "On data refresh." The hourly option has more granularity for you to check every 15 mins to up to 2 hours between runs. "On data refresh" is particularly useful – it only sends an email after the underlying dataset has been updated successfully, ensuring you always get the latest data the moment it's available.
Scheduled Time & Timezone: Pick the time of day and the correct timezone for delivery.
Start and End Date: You can set a subscription to start immediately and run indefinitely, or you can specify a start and end date. This is great for temporary project reporting.

Step 6: Save and Test

Once you are happy with your settings, click Save at the bottom of the pane. Your subscription is now active!

If you want to immediately see what the email will look like, you can click the three dots (...) next to your new subscription in the list and select Run now. This will trigger the subscription to send immediately, which is a great way to test your settings and make sure everything looks right.

Subscribing Your Team to a Report

Keeping your team on the same page is one of the biggest benefits of subscriptions. If you have "Editor," "Member," or "Admin" access to the workspace (known as workspace roles), you can create a subscription and add other people's email addresses.

The process is nearly identical to subscribing yourself, with one key difference:

When you get to the subscription configuration panel, in the "Subscribe" box where your name appears, you can start typing the name of a colleague or an entire email group.
Select them from the directory, and they will be added to the recipient list.

One security feature to keep in mind is Row-Level Security (RLS). If your report uses RLS to show different data to different users (for example, salespeople only seeing their own deals), Power BI is smart enough to respect that. When a subscription runs, it will generate a unique report view for each RLS-secured recipient. This means you can have one subscription for your entire sales team, and each person will still only receive a snapshot of their own data.

How to Manage and Troubleshoot Your Subscriptions

It’s easy to forget about subscriptions once they’re running, but you'll eventually need to edit, pause, or troubleshoot them.

Finding Your Subscriptions

You can see all of your subscriptions in one place:

In the Power BI service, click the gear icon in the top-right corner.
Select Settings from the menu.
On the settings page, click the Subscriptions tab.

This screen shows all the subscriptions you've created across all workspaces. From here, you can turn a subscription on or off with the slider, edit its details by clicking the pencil icon, or delete it entirely.

Common Subscription Problems

Emails Aren't Arriving: Your first stop should be your spam or junk folder. If it's not there, it's possible your organization's IT department has email filter rules that are blocking messages from Power BI. It's also possible the report's underlying data failed to refresh, which prevents the subscription from running.
The Subscription is Disabled: If the underlying report or dataset is deleted, an owner leaves the company, or credentials to access data have expired, Power BI will automatically disable the subscription. You’ll need to investigate the cause and re-enable it after fixing it.
Visuals in the Email Look Wrong: Email subscriptions don't always render custom Power BI visuals perfectly. If an image looks broken, try to use standard, out-of-the-box Power BI visuals for reports you plan to subscribe to widely.

Final Thoughts

Setting up a Power BI subscription is an effective way to automate your reporting and make sure crucial business data gets in front of the right people at the right time. By following these steps, you can move from manually pulling reports to having a reliable, automated flow of information distributed across your team.

Learning the clicks inside of BI tools is powerful, but it’s often just one part of the data puzzle. Before a report even gets to the subscription stage, hours are often spent gathering data from different platforms and wrestling it into a usable format. That’s an area where we created Graphed to help. We let you connect marketing and sales sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce in seconds, so you can build real-time dashboards just by describing what you need in plain English. It removes the manual importing and report-building, allowing you to get from raw data to sharable insights instantly.