How to Build Client Reporting with Screenshots, PDFs, and Videos

Manual reporting is a time sink

Agency teams and internal ops groups spend hours each week logging into dashboards, taking screenshots, formatting them into decks, and uploading to shared drives. Every step is manual, error-prone, and unrepeatable. A screenshot API turns this into a scheduled pipeline that runs unattended.

What you can automate

• Dashboard screenshots — capture analytics dashboards, ad performance, or KPI pages after logging in via automation steps
• PDF reports — render full-page PDFs of campaign results or financial dashboards
• Video walkthroughs — record a video of a multi-step flow (funnel analysis, checkout test) as visual evidence
• Data extraction — pull KPI values (conversion rate, revenue, ad spend) alongside the screenshot

Delivery destinations

After capture, deliver assets directly to your client's preferred tool:

• Google Drive — shared folders for client access
• Slack — channel notifications with the screenshot attached
• S3 — for programmatic access and CDN serving
• Dropbox — for clients who use Dropbox workflows

Example workflow: weekly SEO report

import screenshotcenter

client = screenshotcenter.Client(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY")

# Capture the analytics dashboard (requires login)
screenshot = client.create(
    url="https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/",
    steps=[
        {"action": "type", "target": "#identifierId", "value": "team@agency.com"},
        {"action": "click", "target": "#identifierNext button"},
        {"action": "wait", "value": 2000},
        {"action": "type", "target": "input[type=password]", "value": "s3cret"},
        {"action": "click", "target": "#passwordNext button"},
        {"action": "wait", "value": 5000},
    ],
    pdf=True,
    apps=[{
        "app": "google-drive",
        "folder_id": "1ABCdef_client_folder",
        "filename": "weekly-seo-report-{yyyy}-{mm}-{dd}.pdf"
    }],
)

print(f"Report delivered: {screenshot['id']}")

Scheduling

Run the script on a cron job (every Monday at 8 AM) or via Zapier for no-code scheduling. The API handles retries, so transient failures do not require manual intervention.

Learn more

See the full client reporting use case for more patterns including multi-dashboard captures, video evidence, and comparing reports across time periods.