Custom Salesforce Report: 3 Easy Steps

Salesforce is a subscription-based customer relationship management software that is offered as a completely managed cloud service. Salesforce revolutionized the CRM space by sparing customers the effort of developing custom software or maintaining installations of third-party software.

In this blog post, we will discuss how to create Custom Salesforce Reports.

Prerequisites

• Salesforce account with legacy folder sharing and enhanced folder sharing permissions
• Basic understanding of SaaS offerings

Introduction to Salesforce

Salesforce provides modules for lead management, account management, order processing, invoicing, and customer support. It also aids in decision-making for senior management by exposing the data through dashboards and reports.

Other than the default dashboards provided by Salesforce, there are a number of useful third-party dashboards that are available in the application store.

When it comes to reports, Salesforce provides a comprehensive list of reports together with a provision for building custom report types in its user interface. In this post, you will learn how to set up custom report types in Salesforce.

Setting Up Custom Salesforce Report

The steps involved in setting up the Salesforce Reports are:

• Step 1: Defining Custom Salesforce Report Types
• Step 2: Configuring Report Records Set
• Step 3: Specify the Layout for your Custom Salesforce Report

Step 1: Defining Custom Salesforce Report Types

You will begin creating Custom Salesforce Reports by navigating to the setup screen and entering report types in the quick search box. In the result section, select Report types and click the new Report type.

Step 2: Configuring Report Records Set

Add the details of the primary object, report label, and report description. The primary object is the salesforce object which forms the base for this report. We will select Accounts here. Category stands for the report category where salesforce will display this report once deployed. For now, let’s select Other reports as the category.

Select the secondary object. Secondary objects are child objects that are related to primary objects such that they need to be displayed in the report.

Select Opportunities for this exercise. While selecting the secondary object, you will need to specify whether the parent records without child objects need to be displayed or not. Select the first option in case you need to; otherwise, select the second option.

Step 3: Specify the Layout for your Custom Salesforce Report

Click save and you will be presented with a screen that shows fields from both primary as well as secondary objects. Click Edit Layout to select which fields should be displayed in your report.

You can now drag and drop fields to the report to customize it the way you like it. In case you do not need a field, just drag it out of the report to the right-hand section where they will be available for future use. 

Click save and your report will be saved. Refresh the page once and you should be able to see your newly configured custom report in the report section of Salesforce.

That concludes the steps involved in setting up Custom Salesforce Reports.

Conclusion

Custom Salesforce Report types are an excellent tool that helps to bring the most out of your Salesforce data in a way that suits your use case.

That said, reports can be made even more relevant and insightful if the data from salesforce can be combined with your data coming from on-premise databases or other cloud-based services.

Unfortunately, salesforce does not natively provide an option to do this. But using a cloud-based completely managed ETL tool like Hevo can help you combine data sources in a  matter of few clicks and feed it your preferred reporting solution to create even deeper reports. 

Share your experience with Custom Salesforce Report types in the comments section below!