Salesforce reporting is powerful, easy to use, and always improving. With an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and dozens of free pre-built dashboard templates on the app-exchange, building a clean and insightful dashboard in a matter of minutes is commonplace for any experienced admin. While many of these basic reports can help steer your business down the right path, here are 5 additional tools built into Salesforce that can help expand your reporting requirements. 

Custom Report Types

Out of the box Salesforce comes with an array of pre-built report types that analyze many of the “Standard” objects within Salesforce. This may include “Account with Opportunities” and “Leads with Activities,” and Salesforce will automatically create new report types for the Custom objects you create based on the look-up and parent-child relationships. 

This is all brilliant stuff, but what if we need to compare over 2 objects in a report, or report on “with” relationships and not exclude records “without” relationship? Custom reports provide added flexibility. 

With custom reports, admins can connect up to four related objects. These objects must have one common relationship, either at the child or grandchild level. For example, we could build the report Account with Opportunities and Opportunity Products, aggregating all the information in each of these objects into a single report. 

Custom reports provide control over how these relationships filter by determining a “with” or “with/without” relationship. As an example, the Standard report “Account with Opportunities” only shows accounts that have accounts that have an opportunity record. By changing that to a “with/without” relationship using a custom report type, it is possible to view all accounts and all opportunities into a single report.

Cross-Filters

While custom report types aggregate data through relationships, cross-filters are used to build exceptions. These filters answer the question, “Is related data or not?” Cross filters can be added to any custom or standard report filter without modifying the underlying report type. Navigate to the filter section in the Lightning report editor—cross filter can be added in the bottom section.

Custom Summary Formulas

Custom Summary Formulas live inside the reports itself and are used to calculate new insights using the standard data tracked in Salesforce. These formulas can help provide a stepping stone in between Salesforce’s reporting functionality and a full-blown BI tool. While many admins will not need to calculate complex logarithms within their report, being able to add a quick ratio or calculate the difference between two fields is useful. 

Historical Trend Reporting

Historical trend reporting is used to see changes on records over a day period or a week. Designed to be limited but user friendly, these trend reports track up to 8 opportunity fields or 3 fields on a custom object over a 5-day or 5-week period. Salesforce plots the changes in the data side-by-side. This can be a great and easy way to show changes in the sales pipeline. 

Snapshot Reporting

Analytical snap shows capture system data at a scheduled point and time, and write that data to a custom object. They are the big brother to historical trend reporting and track both long term and short term trends. 

To build a snapshot report follow these three steps:

— Build a source report—a report on a specific object that contains all the data that needs to be tracked over time. 

— Build a custom object – This will store all the data from the source report. It will require custom fields for each field in the report.

— Schedule the Snap Shot – a out of the box process in Salesforce that allows you to map the report to the custom object. 

Sadhana Consulting helps businesses across multiple verticals leverage the power of customized Salesforce reporting within their operations. Contact us today to learn more.  

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