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- Control access to business finances
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Freeze a report into a snapshot
Capture a saved report's data and PDF as a permanent, read-only snapshot, print or download it, schedule automatic captures with email recipients, and share or revoke the links you send out.
What you'll achieve
Freeze a saved report exactly as you see it today, on demand or on a schedule, and hand that frozen view to someone else safely.
You'll end up with: A snapshot history for a saved report, a monthly schedule that captures automatically, and a share link a recipient can open without logging into Monument.
Before you start
A snapshot is a photograph, not a window
A saved report is a window: open it next month and the numbers have moved on, because it's still querying live data. A snapshot is a photograph: the moment you take it, the data and a PDF are frozen and stored separately from the report itself, and neither one ever changes again, no matter what happens to the underlying projects, invoices, or time entries afterwards. This builds on the same saved-report shape from Build a custom report: anything you can save as a report, you can snapshot, Project Margins among them.
That distinction matters most at month end and for anything you need to defend later, an "as of" board pack, a client-facing revenue summary, a record of exactly what a project looked like on the day you sent an invoice. A live report can't answer "what did this say on the 3rd", a snapshot can, forever.
Capture one by hand
Every saved report's Actions menu has a Capture snapshot action, and its own View snapshots action for the history it builds up. Capturing doesn't touch the report itself, it's a side action that produces a new, independent artifact.
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Open a saved report, Meridian Studio's Project Margins report, say, and open Actions in the top-right corner.
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Choose Capture snapshot. Monument confirms the capture has started, then open Actions again and choose View snapshots to watch the new row in the history table, generating.
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Once it finishes, the row flips to Complete and you can open it, exactly as it looked at the moment you clicked.
A snapshot captures whatever filters were in effect on the report at the moment you clicked, so narrow the report first if you only want a slice frozen, the whole thing if you don't.
A snapshot can hold up to 50,000 rows. A report that returns more than that fails to capture with a clear error rather than silently cutting itself off partway through, narrow it with a filter first if you hit this.
A snapshot freezes every block, not just one table
If the report you're snapshotting is built from blocks, a stat row above a chart above a detail table, say, the snapshot freezes all of them together as one artifact, in the same order they appear in the report. Open the snapshot later and every block is exactly as it was: the stat tiles show the same numbers, the chart shows the same bars, the table shows the same rows. The PDF matches: every chart in the report renders as an actual chart on the page, not a table of the numbers behind it.
A block you couldn't see when you captured stays that way in the snapshot: it shows Unavailable instead of a title or any data, in the same position it would otherwise occupy, so the rest of the report doesn't reflow around it. That's the same rule as a locked column, just at the level of a whole block instead of one field.
It's frozen as your view, not a neutral one
This is the part worth understanding before you share anything: a snapshot isn't captured by some neutral system account, it's captured as you, using your own permissions at the moment you click. If your financial visibility locks certain columns, salary-derived figures, say, those columns are frozen as locked placeholders in the snapshot too, not as the real numbers with a lock icon painted over them after the fact. There's no way to unlock them later by looking harder or asking someone else to open the same snapshot.
Because of that, capturing or scheduling a snapshot is treated as a real disclosure decision, not a neutral save. Every snapshot you open shows a banner naming who captured it and when, "Captured by Priya Sharma on 14 Aug 2026", so nobody mistakes a frozen personal view for an official, permission-neutral copy of the report. Opening a snapshot also shows each viewer their own current permissions on top of what was frozen: the stored data and PDF never change, but a viewer whose access has since narrowed sees less than the snapshot originally captured.
Opening a snapshot in-app re-checks your own current financial visibility on top of whatever was locked at capture time, so it can only hide more columns for you, never reveal ones the capturer didn't have. If a colleague with tighter permissions opens the same snapshot, they may see fewer columns than you did.
Print or download the frozen copy
Once a snapshot is open, two ways to get it out of Monument sit right on the page: Print, for a paper copy or another PDF, and each history row's own Download PDF, for the PDF Monument already rendered at capture time.
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With a snapshot open, click Print to open the browser's print view of exactly what's on screen, choose a printer there, or save it as another PDF.
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Back in the snapshot history, each completed row has its own Download PDF, using the PDF Monument generated the moment that snapshot was captured.
Print always reflects your own current permission masking on top of the frozen data, the same rule as opening the snapshot itself. Download PDF, by contrast, hands you the exact file Monument rendered and stored at capture time, masked for the capturer's permissions at that moment, not necessarily yours.
Put it on a schedule
Capturing by hand is fine for a one-off, but the real payoff is a schedule: pick a cadence and Monument captures automatically from then on, no one needing to remember.
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From the Snapshots view, click Create schedule.
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Choose Daily, Weekly, or Monthly. Weekly asks for a day of the week; Monthly asks for a day of the month (shorter months use their last day instead). This walkthrough sets Monthly on day fifteen.
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Set the time of day. New schedules default to your organization's timezone.
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Add recipients if you want the snapshot emailed out: staff members from the people picker, external email addresses typed in and confirmed with Enter, or both.
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Leave Enabled on and click Create schedule. The badge next to the report updates immediately to Monthly on day 15.
A schedule always captures as whoever created it, the same disclosure rule as a manual snapshot applies here too. Editing a schedule's cadence recomputes its next run time immediately; its timezone, once set, doesn't change on edit, only the schedule's creator or an admin can change or delete it at all.
If the person who created a schedule leaves the organization, their linked staff record goes inactive, or they lose access to the underlying report, Monument pauses the schedule automatically rather than continuing to disclose data on their behalf, and shows the reason right on the schedule row. An admin can re-enable a paused schedule, but doing so re-stamps whoever re-enables it as the new capture actor: it's a fresh disclosure decision, not a resume button.
What recipients see
Every recipient on a schedule, staff or external, gets the same email once a scheduled snapshot completes: the report name, the capture date, the row count (or a plain "no data for this period" if the report came back empty), a PDF attached, and a "View report" button. That button opens a public page, no Monument login required, showing the exact same frozen data and PDF download the email promised.
If the rendered PDF is too large to attach, the email says so plainly and still includes the working share link, so a recipient can always view or download the report even when the attachment itself didn't make it.
Share links stick around until you turn them off
A snapshot's share links don't expire on their own, "view forever" is the point of a snapshot in the first place. If you need to cut off access, the history table's disable share links action revokes every link ever sent for that snapshot at once. This can't be undone selectively, there's no way to disable one recipient's link while leaving another recipient's link for the same snapshot working, and revoking doesn't delete the snapshot itself, it stays in the history, just no longer reachable by anyone holding an old link.
Troubleshooting
- A column shows "locked" in a snapshot. That's frozen from the moment of capture, based on the capturer's own financial visibility at the time. It can't be unlocked after the fact, capture again as someone with broader access if the snapshot genuinely needs those values.
- A block shows "Unavailable" in a snapshot. Same rule as a locked column, at the block level: the capturer couldn't see that block's data, so the snapshot never captured it. Capture again as someone with access to that block's data if the report genuinely needs it.
- Download PDF is disabled, or warns the PDF is outside your visibility. Your own financial visibility is narrower than the snapshot's capturer had. The in-app data view still shows you everything you're allowed to see, just not the PDF, which was rendered once from the capturer's fuller view.
- A report over 50,000 rows won't capture. That's the hard ceiling for a snapshot. Narrow the report with a filter before capturing, or before creating a schedule against it.
- A schedule shows Paused with a reason. Its creator lost access, whether by leaving the organization, going inactive, or losing report access. An admin needs to re-enable it, which makes them the new capture actor going forward.
- A recipient says their emailed link stopped working. Someone with manage rights on that snapshot used disable share links, which revokes every link for that snapshot at once, not just one recipient's. Capture a fresh snapshot and it'll generate new links.
- Deleting a snapshot doesn't touch the schedule that created it, and deleting a schedule doesn't touch any snapshots it already produced. They're independent: a schedule is a recipe, a snapshot is one already-baked result.
Where this fits next
Snapshots turn a live, ever-changing report into something you can point to and say "this is exactly what it said." For the live version of the same numbers, kept current rather than frozen, see the home dashboard. To build the report you'll snapshot in the first place, start with Build a custom report, or Time-series columns if that report needs to show a trend.