TrustLens Scheduled Reports: Risk Monitoring Without Checking the Dashboard Every Day
Plugin Guide · TrustLens
TrustLens Scheduled Reports
The dashboard tells you everything — but only when you’re looking at it. Scheduled Reports bring the risk picture to your inbox on your schedule, so monitoring no longer depends on remembering to log in. Here’s what each cadence delivers, how to set it up, and which one fits your store.
The TrustLens Command Center dashboard is genuinely good at its job. The health ring, the trust score trend line, the chargeback ratio speedometer, the Customers Requiring Attention list — all of it is designed so that when something needs your attention, it’s obvious at a glance. We’ve argued elsewhere that a five-minute Monday review is all most stores need.
But that whole model rests on one assumption: that you actually open the dashboard. And in practice, plenty of stores don’t. Fraud and return abuse are not the thing a busy operator thinks about on a normal Tuesday. The dashboard sits there, accurate and unread, until something goes wrong loudly enough to pull attention back to it — by which point the chargeback ratio has already climbed, or the serial returner has already placed their twentieth order.
Scheduled Reports flip that relationship. Instead of you going to the risk picture, the risk picture comes to you — on a cadence you choose. This post explains exactly what that means in TrustLens, what the reports contain, how to set them up, and — just as importantly — what they don’t replace.
The Problem With Passive Stores
Customer risk is not a static quantity. It changes continuously. A customer who looked fine last month files a chargeback. A new account starts a return-then-refund pattern. A flash sale brings in a cluster of welcome-discount farmers who won’t show their colors until their second or third order. Your blended chargeback ratio is recalculated against the calendar month every time a dispute lands.
The dashboard reflects all of this in real time. The catch is that “real time” only helps if someone is watching in real time. Most store owners check fraud tooling reactively — after a painful chargeback, after a margin surprise, after a gateway warning email. The gap between “the data changed” and “I noticed the data changed” is where the avoidable losses live.
There are two honest ways to close that gap. One is discipline: a recurring calendar reminder to do the Monday review, every week, without fail. That works for some people. The other is to remove the need for discipline entirely — to have the summary delivered whether or not you remember. For most stores, the second approach is the one that actually survives contact with a busy week.
How this post was fact-checked
Feature claims here were verified against the TrustLens readme.txt at version 1.2.6 (June 2026). Scheduled Reports is listed under “What Pro adds” as “daily, weekly, or monthly email summaries of store risk activity, customer trends, and protection KPIs.” Where the readme describes report contents in general terms rather than naming every metric, this post does the same rather than inventing specifics — the configuration screen in your install is the authoritative source for the exact fields your reports include.
What Scheduled Reports Are — And What the Free Version Already Gives You
Here’s a distinction worth getting right before anything else, because it changes whether this feature is even relevant to you.
TrustLens Free already sends a weekly protection report by email. It’s one of the core notifications that ships in the free version, alongside the blocked-checkout alert and the post-activation welcome summary. So if all you want is a once-a-week recap landing in your inbox, you may already have it — check TrustLens → Settings under notifications and confirm it’s switched on.
Scheduled Reports is a Pro feature, and what it adds on top of that single free weekly email is control: the ability to choose your cadence — daily, weekly, or monthly — rather than being limited to the one fixed weekly digest. It is built for stores that either need risk summaries more often than weekly (a daily pulse for high-volume or fraud-prone operations) or want a lighter monthly rollup instead, and for teams that want the summary going to the right people.
| Capability | Free | Pro (Scheduled Reports) |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly protection report by email | ✓ One fixed weekly digest | ✓ Included, plus more cadences |
| Daily cadence | ✗ | ✓ |
| Monthly cadence | ✗ | ✓ |
| Choose recipients | Sends to the site notification email | ✓ Configurable |
If you’re still deciding whether the Pro tier is worth it overall, the complete TrustLens Free vs Pro breakdown maps every feature boundary — Scheduled Reports is one line in a much larger picture that also includes automation rules, the advanced chargeback monitor, and payment-method risk controls.
What Lands in Your Inbox
The readme describes Scheduled Reports as email summaries of store risk activity, customer trends, and protection KPIs. That maps directly onto the metrics the Command Center already tracks, so the most useful way to think about a scheduled report is as a snapshot of the dashboard’s key signals — delivered rather than fetched.
In practice, the kinds of figures TrustLens surfaces across its dashboard and reporting — and which a risk-activity summary draws from — include things like:
- Trust score movement — how the average trust score across your profiled customers has trended over the reporting window.
- Segment distribution shifts — changes in how many customers sit in each of the six segments (VIP, Trusted, Normal, Caution, Risk, Critical), with a growing Critical count being the signal that matters most.
- New high-risk customers — accounts that have entered Risk or Critical, the ones most likely to warrant a closer look.
- Refund and return activity — refund volume and the kind of full-versus-partial pattern that hints at wardrobing.
- Chargeback ratio status — where your blended ratio sits relative to the card-network monitoring thresholds.
- Protection KPIs — the revenue-protection-style figures (actions taken, checkouts blocked, orders held) that quantify what TrustLens has been doing on your behalf.
The exact contents come from your install, not this post
The list above describes the categories of risk metric TrustLens tracks — it is not a literal field-by-field reproduction of a scheduled report, and the precise figures, their labels, and how much shorter the daily email is versus the monthly one are details that can change between plugin versions. Treat the report-configuration screen in your own Pro install as the source of truth for exactly what each cadence includes. We’ve deliberately avoided inventing metric names the readme doesn’t commit to.
One thing worth noting about the protection KPIs specifically: as the dashboard guide explains in detail, figures like “money protected” and “money at risk” are modeled estimates built from behavioral signals, not hard accounting numbers. The most reliable line in any summary is the count of concrete actions taken — checkouts blocked, orders held — because those are observed facts rather than projections. That holds true whether you’re reading those numbers on the dashboard or in an emailed report.
Setting It Up: Where to Find It and How to Configure It
Scheduled Reports lives in the TrustLens notification settings, which is where all of the plugin’s email behavior is configured. The free weekly protection report and the Pro advanced notification types share the same area, so it’s worth knowing your way around it.
The general flow is:
- Confirm Pro is active. Scheduled Reports beyond the free weekly digest is a Pro feature, so the cadence options appear only when you have a valid TrustLens Pro license activated.
- Open the notification settings. From the TrustLens admin, head to Settings and find the notifications area. (TrustLens groups its email controls together — the same place you’d toggle the free weekly report and the Pro alert types.)
- Enable scheduled reports and pick a cadence. Choose daily, weekly, or monthly depending on how closely you want to track risk. The next section covers how to choose.
- Set the recipients. Decide who receives the summary. For a solo operator that’s just you; for a team, you might route it to a shared operations or fraud-review inbox so it doesn’t depend on a single person reading their mail.
- Make sure your store can actually send email. This is the step most often overlooked. If your WordPress install doesn’t reliably send transactional email, no scheduled report will reach you. Many stores use an SMTP plugin or a transactional email service to ensure deliverability — if you’ve ever had order confirmation emails land in spam or vanish, fix that before relying on scheduled reports.
Send a test before you trust it
After enabling any scheduled report, confirm one actually arrives — and that it lands in the inbox, not the spam folder — before you mentally file the task as “handled.” A report you assume is being delivered but isn’t is worse than no report, because it creates false confidence. If your first scheduled send doesn’t show up, check your email deliverability setup first; that’s the usual culprit, not the plugin.
Exact labels and the precise position of these controls can shift between plugin versions as the settings UI evolves, so if a menu name here doesn’t match your screen exactly, look for the notifications grouping within TrustLens Settings — that’s where the report cadence lives. For a fuller tour of how TrustLens email notifications are organized overall, the Free vs Pro guide walks through which notification types belong to which tier.
Which Cadence Fits Which Store
The right cadence is the one you’ll actually read without it becoming noise. A report that arrives more often than you can act on it trains you to ignore it — which defeats the entire purpose. Match the frequency to your order volume and your risk exposure, not to a vague sense that more is better.
| Cadence | Best for | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Daily | High-volume stores; stores actively under or recovering from fraud pressure; anyone running a major sale event | When you’re processing hundreds of orders a day, a week is long enough for a card-testing run or a chargeback cluster to do real damage before a weekly report would surface it. A daily pulse catches fast-moving problems while they’re still small. During peak periods like Black Friday, daily visibility is especially worth it. |
| Weekly | Most stores, most of the time | This is the default sweet spot. It aligns with the five-minute Monday review the dashboard is designed around, gives enough of a window for genuine trends to emerge above the daily noise, and arrives often enough that nothing festers for long. If you’re unsure, start here. |
| Monthly | Low-volume or light-touch stores; established stores with stable, clean customer bases; a complement to a more frequent cadence | For a store doing modest volume with little fraud history, a monthly rollup is enough to stay aware without manufacturing anxiety over normal week-to-week wobble. Some stores also use monthly as a higher-altitude companion to a weekly or daily report — the weekly catches incidents, the monthly shows the longer arc. |
A practical pattern for a growing store: start on weekly, switch to daily when you enter a high-risk period (a big promotion, an active attack, a stretch of elevated chargebacks), then drop back to weekly once things settle. The cadence isn’t a permanent decision — revisit it as your volume and exposure change. If peak-season fraud is your specific concern, our guide to closing the gap between a lost dispute and a blocked customer pairs well with running a tighter reporting cadence during sale events.
What Scheduled Reports Don’t Replace
This is the most important section in the post, because it’s where stores get the feature wrong. Scheduled Reports are a passive monitoring layer. They keep you informed. They do not act, and they are not fast.
A scheduled report is a digest. By definition it’s looking backward over a window — yesterday, last week, last month. That’s exactly right for spotting trends and staying aware. It’s exactly wrong for stopping an attack in progress. A daily report that tells you a card-testing run happened yesterday is useful context; it is not a defense. The defense already happened (or didn’t) in real time, at the moment the attack hit your checkout.
So a scheduled report complements, but never substitutes for, the real-time layers of TrustLens:
| Need | The right tool | Why a scheduled report isn’t enough |
|---|---|---|
| Act automatically when a customer’s risk changes | Automation Rules (Pro) | Rules fire on the event — a score drop, a dispute, a linked-account detection — and can hold an order or block a customer immediately. A report only tells you it happened, after the fact. |
| Stop a card-testing attack as it happens | Card-Testing Defense (free), plus Pro attack alerts | Defense works in real time, locking out attacking device fingerprints within seconds. Pro can dispatch an immediate Slack or email alert when an attack is detected — that’s an event alert, not a digest. |
| Know the moment your chargeback ratio nears a threshold | Chargeback ratio email alerts (Pro) | This is a daily threshold check that emails you before a brand crosses its monitoring program limit — triggered by proximity to danger, not by the calendar. |
| Block a customer the instant they cost you a dispute | Auto-Block After N Lost Disputes (Pro) | Runtime enforcement acts at the moment of the lost dispute. A monthly report would surface the problem weeks too late. |
The mental model that works: real-time tools decide and act; scheduled reports keep you oriented. The automation rules, the attack alerts, the auto-block, the threshold-proximity emails — those are event-driven and fast. Scheduled Reports are time-driven and reflective. A well-set-up store uses both: the fast layer handles incidents the moment they occur, and the report layer makes sure the human in the loop never loses sight of the bigger trend.
And one accuracy point worth being blunt about: none of this changes the fact that TrustLens Free never auto-blocks anyone. Scheduled Reports — like every other reporting and alerting feature — surface information. They do not enforce. Any automatic action requires Pro, and requires you to have deliberately configured it. A report landing in your inbox is a prompt for a human decision, not a substitute for one.
The layered setup most stores land on
A common end state for a store that takes fraud seriously: Card-Testing Defense running in real time at checkout, a couple of conservative automation rules handling the clearest risk signals automatically, chargeback ratio alerts watching the network thresholds — and a weekly scheduled report tying it all together so the owner stays aware of the trend without living inside the dashboard. The report is the calm layer on top of the fast machinery underneath.
Common Questions
Do I need TrustLens Pro to get any report by email?
No. TrustLens Free includes a weekly protection report as one of its core email notifications — check the notification settings under TrustLens → Settings to confirm it’s enabled. What Pro’s Scheduled Reports adds is the ability to choose a different cadence (daily or monthly, not just the fixed weekly) and to configure recipients. If a single weekly digest to your site email is all you want, the free version may already cover it.
What cadence should I start with?
Weekly, for most stores. It matches the rhythm the TrustLens dashboard is built around, filters out daily noise while still catching genuine trends, and arrives often enough that nothing serious goes unnoticed for long. Move to daily if you’re high-volume, actively dealing with fraud, or running a major sale; consider monthly if you’re low-volume with a stable, clean customer base. You can change it whenever your situation changes.
Will a daily report stop a card-testing attack?
No — and it’s important not to rely on it for that. A scheduled report is a backward-looking digest; it tells you what happened over the window, not what’s happening right now. Stopping an attack as it occurs is the job of Card-Testing Defense (free, real-time) and, in Pro, the immediate attack alerts and automation rules. Use the report to stay aware of trends and confirm the fast layers are doing their job — not as a frontline defense.
Why isn’t my scheduled report arriving?
The most common cause is email deliverability, not the plugin. Scheduled reports are sent like any other WordPress email, so if your store doesn’t reliably send transactional mail, the report won’t arrive. Confirm your site can send email (an SMTP plugin or a transactional email service is the usual fix), check the spam folder, and verify the recipient address in the report settings. Also confirm your Pro license is active if you’ve selected a daily or monthly cadence, since those options require Pro.
Can different reports go to different people?
Scheduled Reports lets you configure recipients, which is one of the main reasons to use it over the single free weekly digest — you can route the summary to a shared operations or fraud-review inbox rather than a single personal address. The exact recipient options depend on your plugin version, so check the report configuration screen in your install for the precise controls available to you.
Does receiving a report change anything about how TrustLens scores or blocks customers?
No. Scheduled Reports are purely informational — they read the data TrustLens has already collected and email you a summary. They don’t alter scoring, they don’t block anyone, and the free version never auto-blocks under any circumstances. Enforcement (manual blocking in Free; automated actions in Pro via automation rules or auto-block-after-disputes) is entirely separate from reporting. A report is a prompt to look, not an action in itself.
Key Takeaways
- The dashboard only helps if you open it. Scheduled Reports close the gap between when your risk picture changes and when you notice — by delivering the summary instead of waiting for you to fetch it.
- Free already sends a weekly protection report. If a single weekly email is all you need, check your TrustLens notification settings — you may have it already. Pro’s Scheduled Reports adds the daily and monthly cadences and configurable recipients.
- Cadence should match volume and exposure. Daily for high-volume or fraud-pressured stores and sale events; weekly for most stores as the default; monthly for low-volume or stable stores. A report you can’t act on becomes noise.
- Reports describe; they don’t act. A scheduled report is a backward-looking digest. It complements — never replaces — the real-time layers: automation rules, card-testing attack alerts, chargeback ratio threshold alerts, and auto-block.
- Deliverability is the hidden failure point. A report you assume is arriving but isn’t creates false confidence. Make sure your store reliably sends email, and send a test before trusting any cadence.
- The free version never auto-blocks. Reporting and alerting surface information; enforcement is separate and, when automatic, requires Pro and deliberate configuration.
Bring the Risk Picture to You
Scheduled Reports — daily, weekly, or monthly — are part of TrustLens Pro, alongside automation rules, the advanced chargeback monitor, and payment-method risk controls. Start with the free version to see your customer risk picture, then add Pro when you want it delivered and acted on automatically.
