Reporting With Own

September 7, 2023in Enterprise

In any Salesforce organization, vast amounts of data are generated constantly from sales activities, customer interactions, marketing campaigns, and more. Summarizing and digesting this information quickly is crucial, especially when presenting the big picture to leadership. This is where Salesforce reports come into play.

The Salesforce Reports feature enables organizations to analyze, visualize, and summarize data in real time. By pulling data from across your Salesforce environment, reports help consolidate information into easily digestible formats, such as charts, tables, and graphs.

Salesforce reports are essential for:

Tracking progress toward goals: Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to stay aligned with organizational objectives.
Predicting trends: Identify patterns and forecast future outcomes to adjust strategies proactively.
Gaining business insights: Get detailed views of customer behaviors, sales pipelines, and marketing campaigns to make informed, data-driven decisions.
Supporting decision-making: Empower stakeholders with actionable insights, driving strategic planning and operational efficiency.

How Historical Data Can Improve Reporting in Salesforce

While real-time reports are valuable, incorporating historical data can significantly enhance reporting by offering deeper insights into your organization’s long-term performance. Here’s how:

Improved Forecasting and Predictive Analysis Historical data enables more accurate forecasting and predictive analysis. For example, tracking how opportunity fields like contract values change over time can lead to better sales projections, customer demand forecasts, and market trend predictions.
Informed Decision-Making Solely relying on current data can obscure key insights that emerge when analyzing changes over time. Historical data allows you to detect trends, anomalies, or correlations, helping you make more informed decisions and spot potential opportunities or risks earlier.
Long-Term Trends and Patterns Native Salesforce reports often provide only a snapshot of current data. By using historical data, you can identify long-term trends and patterns that wouldn’t be visible in short-term data, such as seasonal fluctuations or long-term growth metrics.

Challenges of Reporting with Historical Data in Salesforce

While incorporating historical data is smart, Salesforce’s native reporting capabilities impose certain limitations:

Data Export Constraints: Salesforce allows you to track historical values via reporting snapshots, but these are limited to 2,000 rows in the browser interface, and you can only schedule up to 200 snapshots with 100 fields per object. This makes large-scale data analysis challenging.
Time Limits: Historical trend reporting in Salesforce is restricted to a three-month window, limiting long-term trend analysis. This can be a challenge for organizations needing to evaluate year-over-year data or measure seasonal patterns.
Performance Issues: Generating reports on large data sets or using complex filters can slow down performance, leading to productivity bottlenecks.

Don’t Let Salesforce Reporting Limitations Hold You Back

With Own Discover, customers can effortlessly generate time-series datasets from any objects and fields over any time period in just a few clicks. These datasets can be accessed using standard query and reporting tools without requiring a data warehouse or the need to enrich existing data warehouses, overcoming Salesforce’s native limitations.