Sales Cloud · numbers for people who never log in
Your directors have no Salesforce licence.
They can still get the numbers every Monday.
A Salesforce report subscription cannot be sent to someone without a licence: Salesforce lets you subscribe users, groups and roles, and lists only those with access to the report. To email the week’s numbers to directors without a licence, a scheduled flow counts the records and sends them to a list of addresses your admin edits. Below are the documented limits, four options compared, and the Monday digest built for an oilfield services group in Central Asia.
Salesforce Help and Trailhead read on 1 November 2026. Reviewed 3 November 2026.
The platform rule
Can a Salesforce report subscription go to an external email address?
No. A report subscription in Lightning Experience goes to users, groups or roles, and Salesforce lists only those who already have access to the report. A director without a user record never appears in that list, so there is nothing to tick. Partner users in Experience Cloud do not receive subscription emails either.
The rule is in Salesforce Help, Subscribe to Reports in Lightning Experience. The numbers are in Reports and Dashboards Limits and Allocations: each user subscribes to up to 7 reports, or 15 in Unlimited Edition; each subscription reaches up to 500 recipients; an org schedules up to 500 report subscriptions for any one hour. For a team that logs in, that is plenty. For a board that never logs in, it is none.
The options, honestly
What are the options when the reader has no licence?
Four, and only one puts the numbers in an outside inbox without a new licence or a new vendor: a scheduled flow that counts the week and sends the email itself. A licence per reader, an export app, or a subscription someone forwards by hand all work too, but each one moves the cost or the risk somewhere else.
| Option | Who can receive it | What it costs you | What catches people |
|---|---|---|---|
| Report subscription | Users, groups and roles with access to the report | Nothing extra, if the reader already has a licence | A reader without a user record cannot be added |
| A licence for each reader | Anyone you license | A licence every year for someone who reads one email a week | Nothing technical; the cost is the whole objection |
| An export or email app | Whatever addresses the app allows | The app’s subscription, and one more vendor holding your data | A second system to approve, update and remove later |
| A scheduled flow that sends a digest | Any address on a list your admin keeps | Build time once; no Apex, no licence for the reader | Sends only from a verified domain; it shows what the flow counts, not the report |
The last row carries one condition the others do not. Salesforce Help, Requirements to Send Email from Salesforce, says every sending domain and subdomain must be verified, by an active DKIM key or an entry in Authorized Email Domains, and that Salesforce cannot send from an organization wide address on an unverified domain even when the address itself is verified. Both routes are a DNS change.
One build, from the inside
A Monday digest for an oilfield services group.
An oilfield services group in Central Asia: a holding and its operating companies in several countries, every lead and deal owned by one company of the group, and directors who do not log in and were never going to. They wanted one email on Monday. This is how it was built, in order; the rest of the rollout is in the second Salesforce implementation case study.
- 01
One list of recipients, kept as records
A custom metadata type holds one row per person and purpose: the address, the company of the group, what the email is for, the channel, and an Active box. Adding a director is a new row in Setup, not a change to the automation and not a job for a developer.
- 02
One run every Monday, one email per company
A schedule triggered flow runs weekly. For each company of the group it finds the people through the company’s role and counts, per person, the leads, deals, tasks and meetings of the week. The director of that company receives that company only; group management receives all of them.
- 03
A table of the week’s new deals, added later
Counts were not enough. After the first weeks the email gained a table of every deal created that week, so a director reads names and customers, not only a number that went up or down.
- 04
The text lives in the flow, not in an email template
The org has no custom email templates and no email alerts. The body is built from text templates inside the flow and sent by the Send Email action from the group’s verified address, so the whole message can be read in one place.
- 05
The same list feeds the deadline reminders
A daily flow warns 7 and 3 days before a bid is due, and when a close date has passed. It reads the same recipients with a different purpose, so one table answers who hears about what.
- 06
What is not live yet, said plainly
A link from each line of the email to the deal itself is built and was tested on a copy of the flow, with a clean dry run. It is not deployed yet, so the live email names the deal and the reader still has to ask someone with a login.
Two checks came from this org rather than from a manual. A scheduled flow can deploy with the status Succeeded and still leave a version that will not activate, so after every deployment the active version is read back from the org. And before the reminders were switched on, the first run was counted: on the first morning it would have sent dozens of emails at once, so it started switched off and was turned on deliberately.
Recipients as records rather than addresses typed into the flow is what Salesforce documents custom metadata for: Custom Metadata Types describes records you create, update and delete in Setup and deploy like any other metadata. The schedule itself follows the org’s default time zone, as the Trailhead unit on scheduled flows points out.
The part nobody asks about
Who decides what a director without a licence may see?
Whoever owns the list of recipients. A subscription respects sharing because every recipient is a user. An email to an outside address has no sharing at all: whatever the flow counts and lists, the reader sees. So each row on the list names a company and a purpose, and one named person approves every new row.
In the group’s build that is the company column on each row: the director of one operating company never receives another company’s deals by accident, because the flow filters by the same company the row names. The access model inside Salesforce is checked separately, as named users; the permissions audit covers that side.
Before anyone builds it
Four answers to have ready.
None of these needs Salesforce open. They decide whether the job is a subscription, a digest, or both.
- 01
Name every reader and mark who has a login
Those with an active user get a report subscription, which costs nothing. Only the rest need a digest. In most groups that second list is short and senior.
- 02
Write down what each reader may see
One company, or the whole group. That line becomes the company column on the recipients list, and it is an access decision, so it gets an owner before it gets a row.
- 03
Ask who runs your domain’s DNS
Salesforce sends from your domain only once that domain is verified, and the verification is a DNS change. If that person is outside the company, it is the slowest step of the whole build.
- 04
Check the org’s default time zone
A scheduled flow runs on it. A group spread across several countries picks one Monday morning and says which one.
Asked often enough to answer here
Questions
- Q
Does a weekly digest like this need Apex?
No. This one is a schedule triggered flow, text templates inside it, the Send Email action and a custom metadata type for recipients. All of it is declarative, which mattered because the group has no developer of its own. An administrator changes recipients and wording without a deployment.
- Q
Will the numbers in the email match the Salesforce report?
Only if both count the same thing. The flow and the report count separately, so agree one definition per number, for example a new deal is one created this week, and write it into the flow description. Then the director and the person with the report quote the same figure.
- Q
What happens when a director leaves?
An administrator clears Active on that person’s row, or deletes it. Nothing is redeployed and no flow is opened. Because every row names its purpose, it is also clear which other emails that person was receiving.
- Q
Can the report itself be attached instead?
Not in this build. The email carries counts per person and a table of new deals in its body, so it reads on a phone and the figures are exactly the ones the flow counted. A director who wants to filter and drill down needs a licence and a report.
The base package includes the reports and dashboards leadership opens on Monday, up to 25 seats. A digest for readers without a licence is built on the same definitions and is scoped in writing before anything is built.
Serhii Skrypnyk · Senior Salesforce Administrator · 7 Salesforce certifications · on the platform since 2018. Reviewed 3 November 2026.
Read next
The question that usually comes after this one.
- 01
What Sales Cloud Costs Per User in 2026
Salesforce lists Sales Cloud from €25 to €550 per user a month. What a year of licences really costs, and the first year once the build is added.
- 02
Starter vs Pro vs Core: Salesforce Limits
Starter Suite, Pro Suite and Core measured in live Salesforce trial orgs: custom objects, flows, Apex, sandboxes and storage, and what the trial does not tell you.
- 03
Case: Group of companies, second rollout
A holding and its operating companies came back to Salesforce after a first rollout stalled: tenders as leads, one customer record in either alphabet, access proved as the users.