Best Practices in Designing Salesforce Reports and Dashboards

Salesforce Reports and Dashboards are one of the main reasons why companies using Salesforce thrive. The wealth of information, ranging from real-time snapshots to yearly summaries, helps companies to quickly and easily generate insights allowing them to act in a timely way responding to market changes and/or operational challenges.

A report is a list of records that meet the criteria set by the questions that have been asked during the report design phase. The data gathered is displayed in Salesforce in rows and columns, and can be filtered, grouped, or displayed in a graphical chart.

A dashboard is a visual representation of the reports in your Salesforce instance. For every dashboard component, there is a report source. Both reports and dashboards are stored in folders. Users can subscribe to a report or a dashboard allowing them to receive notifications by chatter or email. Folders can be public, hidden, or shared. The owner defines who has access to the content based on roles, permissions, public groups, and license type.

When creating reports, a report type can be selected. The report type is essentially a template for making new reports faster and easier. A template controls which fields and records are available for use when creating a report, based on relationships between the primary object and its related objects.

A best practice in making a good Salesforce report is writing and mapping the requirements for the report criteria. We will use a bottled water company to show an example of a report building:

To conclude, when building Reports & Dashboards the key is to collect the meaningful information from the stakeholders that will enable creation of corresponding business relevant Reports & Dashboards bringing better insights for all.

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