Automated PDF report generation

Render a report with one API call

const report = await fetch('https://api.pdfs.build/v2/organizations/org_abc/templates/quarterly-report/render', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Authorization': `Bearer ${API_KEY}`,
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    data: {
      quarter: 'Q1 2025',
      revenue: 1_250_000,
      growth: 0.12,
      departments: [
        {  name: 'Engineering', headcount: 42, spend: 580000 },
        {  name: 'Sales', headcount: 18, spend: 320000 }
      ]
    }
  })
})

Wiring it into a schedule

Reports are rarely rendered by a person clicking a button — they run on the last day of the month, or after the ETL job finishes, or when a customer hits "export". Because a render is a single request that returns application/pdf synchronously, it drops into whatever already runs on a schedule: a cron job, a queue worker, a Lambda, a dbt post-hook, an n8n step.

Reports grow in ways invoices do not

A report is a document whose length you do not control. One month has three campaigns and the next has thirty; a good quarter adds commentary that a flat one does not. The report designs are built so the shape survives that:

• Metric cards keep their grid. Four KPIs or nine, the cards stay on the same rhythm instead of stretching to fill the row.
• Sections repeat per record. A channel, a department, a product line — one block of your data becomes one block on the page, however many there are.
• Running heads and folios hold. On a forty-page pack the reader always knows which section and which page they are on.
• Charts and their captions stay together. A figure never ends up orphaned on the page before the text that explains it.

Each design's page spells out what repeats, what grows and what is pinned, so you can pick one knowing how it will behave on your worst-case month.