Creating reports in salesforce: key points

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The time has come for your business to start asking questions and the data you have collected has the answers. You need information to help you make decisions and the requests for reports are not long in coming:

What has been your total weekly income?
Which region had the highest revenue?
What has been the best-selling product?
A report is created by selecting a group of records from a database. Filters and formulas are applied to this selection to answer the questions you have asked yourself. Included in the license price, Salesforce provides you with tools that allow you to create reports that you can represent in different ways through dashboards. In this article we will show you some basic aspects that can guide you in this world of Salesforce reports and dashboards.

Creating Reports in Salesforce
When creating a report in Salesforce you will need to enter a name, a description, select a report type, format, etc. Reports are always created within folders. You can move the reports you have created from one folder to another, modify, delete or copy them. Depending on the permissions these folders have, other users will be able to perform actions on them. You can also schedule their execution so that they are displayed or sent at a specific time.

Types of reports
Report types can be seen as templates that make it easier spain whatsapp lead to create reports. They are based on relationships between objects, one main object and others related to it. For example, in a “Contacts and Accounts” report, “Contacts” is the main object and “Accounts” is the related object. In a report type, a primary object can be related to up to three secondary objects. They also have a defined selection of fields to display.

There are two types of reports in Salesforce:

Standard reports: Salesforce offers a wide variety (activity, administrative, campaign reports), so it will be very rare that you don't find one that meets your needs.
Custom Reports: Allows you to create your own templates from custom objects or custom views of standard objects and their relationships. You can also select the fields you want to display.
Report formats in Salesforce
Among the formats you can find in the Report Builder menu are:

Tabular

An ordered set of fields in columns, with each matching record numbered in a row. Tabular reports are best for creating lists of records or a list with a single grand total.

Tabular Report Format in Salesforce
Source: Trailhead.com
Summary

Reports in this format allow users to group rows of data, view subtotals, and create charts. They can be used as a source for dashboard components.

Summary Report Format in Salesforce
Source: Trailhead.com
Matrix

Useful for grouping and summarizing data by rows and columns. Can be used as a source for dashboard components.

Matrix Report Format in Salesforce
Source: Trailhead.com
Union

It can contain data from various types of reports (both standard and custom) and up to five report blocks.

Panels or boards
A dashboard allows you to view your reports in a user-friendly and concise manner. These are similar to whiteboards in a command post. They quickly and easily show the status of critical elements and key indicators for your company.

Once you launch the Dashboard Builder, you will be able to insert different types of components into your dashboard:

Dashboard-Builder-en
Other types of components are the Visualforce Page and the Custom S-Control. The former allows you to display data from an external system or display Salesforce data in a custom way. In the latter you can insert any type of content that can be displayed in a browser.

Each component can represent only one report. However, you can use the same report in multiple components.

Salesforce Standard Dashboards
Salesforce makes your job easier by offering a wide variety of standard dashboards, both sales and marketing-oriented and service-oriented. All of them are designed to increase efficiency and accelerate business productivity.

Below are examples of standard dashboards and reports:

Area Panel Reports Description
Sales General State Closed businesses Provides a panoramic view of a company's performance.
Sales pipeline
Month-to-month growth
Forecast by month
Pipe Gen Annual Contract Value (ACV) Closing Useful for anticipating problems related to meeting sales revenue growth targets.
Open flow
Open Flow by Closing Date and Status
Current fiscal quarter output
Activity Management Lead Status by Owner To optimize time management.
Flows and income from the market
Campaign Revenue – Expected vs. Actual
Open Pipe Gen Pen Pipe by State With it you can monitor the growth of your pipeline.
Open Pipe next month
Pipe by Product
Open Pipe by Origin
Marketing Executive Marketing Campaigns by ROI Marketing executives can use this dashboard to find out if they are creating efficient campaigns and generating and converting leads.
Lead Trends Report
Lead Conversion Summary
Real ROI by campaign type
inline-pipe-gen
Executive Marketing Panel in Marketing Cloud
Some limitations in working with Salesforce reports
Depending on the license, the limit of monthly customizable reports varies. For example, with Professional 50 and with Enterprise 200.
Achieving great results when you have little experience working with data in Salesforce can be very laborious and time-consuming.
Combining SFDC (SalesForce Dot Com) data with external data can be extremely complex, although not impossible if you have good advice.
Each user can only subscribe to track a maximum of 5 reports and 5 dashboards, however, more than this is rarely needed.

In general, Salesforce native reports are useful for small businesses without high demands for Business Intelligence (BI). They are used for pipeline analysis, basic sales productivity metrics, and if real-time information is desired. They are less strong in historical and trend comparisons.