At the surface setting up schedule refreshes with sync with is easy, simply choose your report, select schedule from the accordion menu and choose your desired refresh schedule (manual, daily, hourly, weekly, monthly, or every 5 minutes):
You can even specify when the scheduled refresh should run:
With hourly refresh you can specify within 5 minute intervals when each hour to run the refresh, for example on the hour, or 5 minutes after the hour etc.
With daily refresh you can choose to have the refresh to run at the current time each day, or you can choose the hour within the day for it to run, in your local timezone
With weekly refresh you can choose the day of the week and the hour of the day (just like daily refresh)
With monthly refresh you can choose which day within the month to run the refresh, for example the 1st day of each month, and the hour of that day in your local timezone
Data Recency Considerations
For some data recency is very important - eg if you are a day trader you probably want your data refreshed more often and would likely use hourly
For daily KPI check-ins such as site performance, weather, etc. daily is probably a good option
For some reports there is a cost to pulling the data - either in terms of rate limiting or actual api usage (ahrefs, semrush) and so pulling much more slowly is desirable and manual suits just fine
Impact of Sync Mode
Sometimes you want to have to pull daily but you also want a lot of historical data but you don't want to be pulling 180 days of duplicate data every day
For this reason you should do the following
Have the connection in manual mode
Load the last 180 days of data
Change the period to be say the last 2 days
Switch the schedule to daily
Syncwith will not sync the last 2 days of data every day and you'll also have your historical data in your sheet
Known Limitations
The first time the connection has a change to it's schedule value - eg you change it to daily at 1pm in the afternoon, it will now refresh every day at 1pm
The report has any change made to it will cause the schedule time to change to that time as well
Reports can not be prioritized or run in a specific order