In any Salesforce org, a lot is happening at any one time—data is constantly being generated from sales activities, customer interactions, marketing campaigns, and more. Being able to quickly summarize and digest all this information is crucial, especially when you need to provide leadership with the big picture. That’s where Salesforce reports come in.
The Reports feature in Salesforce allows organizations to analyze, visualize, and summarize their data in real time. These reports can pull data from across your Salesforce environment, helping you consolidate information into easily digestible formats like charts, tables, and graphs.
Salesforce reports serve as a crucial asset in helping teams to:
- Track progress toward goals: Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and stay aligned with your organization’s objectives.
- Predict trends: Identify patterns and trends in your data, helping you forecast future outcomes and adjust strategies accordingly.
- Gain insights into various aspects of your business: Get a detailed view of customer behaviors, sales pipelines, marketing campaigns, and more so you can make data-driven decisions.
- Support informed decision-making: Empower stakeholders with actionable insights that lead to more strategic planning, operational efficiency, and business growth.
How Can Historical Data Lead To Better Reporting In Salesforce?
While creating reports and dashboards based on your current data is valuable, incorporating historical data can lead to even better reporting by providing deeper insights into your organization's performance over time. Here are a few examples of how:
Improve Forecasting and Predictive Analysis
By incorporating historical data into your reports, you can perform more accurate forecasting and predictive analysis. In any open opportunity, your fields change constantly, whether it's the contract value, contacts, etc. By leveraging historical data, you can unlock insights into how your data changes over time. Understanding how your data, such as opportunity objects, change over time helps you make better predictions about future outcomes, such as sales projections, customer demand, or market shifts.
Make More-Informed Decisions
When you rely solely on current data, you might miss out on crucial insights that are only apparent when you look at data changes over time. Historical data helps you detect anomalies, correlations, or emerging trends that wouldn’t be obvious from a single point in time. This deeper understanding enables you to make more informed decisions and spot opportunities or risks early on.
Identify Long-Term Trends and Patterns
Native Salesforce reporting often only provides a snapshot of your data, focusing on the present or recent history. Historical data, however, allows you to track trends and patterns over extended periods.
Challenges of Reporting with Historical Data in Salesforce
While reporting with historical data is smart, native Salesforce reporting capabilities limit what you can actually do with it.
Data Export Constraints
In Salesforce you can track historical values by setting up reporting snapshots that regularly query data values and write the results to a custom object that tracks history. However, Salesforce limits reporting snapshots to display only 2,000 rows within the browser interface, and you can only schedule up to 200 reporting snapshots which are limited to 100 fields per object. These restrictions make it difficult to perform comprehensive data analyses directly within Salesforce, especially when working with large datasets.
Time Limits
In Salesforce, you can perform historical trend reporting using a special custom report type designed to highlight changes between five snapshot dates. You can visually represent the data changes in charts and on dashboards. For efficiency sake, Salesforce places limitations on historical trend reporting. One of the most significant is that they only allow access to trend data from the past three months. This narrow window can be an obstacle when your organization needs to analyze long-term trends, making it difficult to identify seasonal patterns or measure performance changes over an extended period.
Performance Issues
Generating reports in Salesforce can take a while, especially when working with large data sets or applying complex report filters. These performance issues can make it frustrating to interact with reports and hinder productivity when dealing with large volumes of data.
Don’t Let Salesforce's Reporting Limitations Hold You Back
Using Own Discover, customers can easily generate time-series data sets by selecting any objects and fields over any time period in the past in a few clicks. They can access these data sets using standard query and reporting tools without needing a data warehouse or enriching existing data warehouses with these data sets.
If you’re ready to take your reporting capabilities to the next level, check out our complete guide, “How to Overcome Reporting and Analytics Limitations in Salesforce” and learn more about industry-specific Discover use cases here.
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