It stops me sitting there hitting refresh on a web page to check my stats every 45 seconds.
Smart man. Aside from customer support information, everything on my dashboard is cached for 24 hours. I do this specifically because I used to waste far, far too much time sitting on Google Analytics mashing refresh. Mashing refresh on the dashboard just shows me the same thing I saw that morning. (I have a URL available which forcibly purges the cache, but it requires me to type in something like i-have-nothing-more-important-to-do-than-this in my URL bar. I think I've used it maybe twice.)
If you are using Django you can get your daily/hourly reports that way pretty easily - set up a cron job to call something based on this...
#!/usr/bin/python
from django.core.management import setup_environ
from datasvcs import settings
setup_environ(settings)
from django.core.mail import send_mail
from django.contrib.auth.models import User,Group
from yourapp import models
# Do model query magic here - compile report as a string.
send_mail('Daily report',report-text,'[email protected]',['[email protected]'])