Reporting Snapshots: Salesforce Reporting Trends Over Time

Here’s an example of how to use reporting snapshots to make your salesforce reporting more meaningful. We implemented this with a nonprofit that tracks membership.  They needed to see how many members they have every month grouped by neighborhood.  Before reporting snapshots, it would have only been possible to see how many members they had at the current time, but not a trend over time.

With a reporting snapshot they are able to track how many members they have every month over month (in each neighborhood) and have it visually represented in a graph.

Some other ways to use the reporting snapshot feature:

·       Number of active volunteers every month

·       How many open cases weekly per user

·       Number of major donors over time

·       Add a few more, and try to think of the exact phrase someone would google when trying to find info on it

The step-by-step process of setting up a reporting snapshot:

1.     I first created a contact report that groups all members by the neighborhood they live in (which in our instance is a picklist field)

2.     Then I created a new custom object that will be used to capture information from the report once a month.  You need to think about what fields you want to be saved and create the corresponding fields on your object.  I created the same Neighborhood picklist field, a number field that will record the number of members in that neighborhood and a field called Snapshot Date to indicate the date the snapshot was taken.

3.     Next I set up the reporting snapshot by going to Setup > Admin Setup > Data Management > Reporting Snapshots.  I chose the source report I created in Step 1 and the custom object I created in Step 2.  Then I mapped fields from the report to the object:

4.     I scheduled the reporting snapshot to run on the last day of the month, but you can choose different frequencies (daily, weekly, monthly).

And then voila!  Records will be created in my custom object on the last day of every month that will document the neighborhood, number of members in that neighborhood and the date.

To wrap it all up I created a new report and chart that looks at these custom object records and groups them by the snapshot date to see how many total members they have every month.

The membership director wanted to see this information without having to run the report so we set it up to have the report emailed to her automatically the day after (another cool Salesforce functionality—scheduling reports).

 

The finished product – a reporting snapshot that tracks and visually represents the number of members grouped by neighborhood on a monthly basis.

 

For more information on setting up your own reporting snapshot in Salesforce, check out the Salesforce resources (documents and video!) or contact Sputnik Moment: we’d love to help you!

How to set up an analytic snapshot (from the Salesforce website)

 

 

Aimee Heintz is a certified Salesforce administrator who has a passion for manipulating data to fit her client’s needs. Connect with her on LinkedIn to ask her your geeky data questions.