Salesforce houses numerous amount of powerful features, many of them unknown to the general public. One of those features is Reporting Snapshots, which enables you to periodically capture a ‘picture’ of a specific report. If all these ‘captures’ are put together, it is possible to quickly spot trends in your data.
When to use Reporting Snapshots?
Reports are a visual representation of the current situation in your database. Examples are the amount of donors, the number of structural agreements and how many cases are currently open.
Current data is useful, but become more interesting when you can put them in perspective. How many donors did I have last year? Why are there 100 cases open and last month only 50?
These snapshots from the past are hard to visualise, unless you use Reporting Snapshots.
How to use Reporting Snapshots?
This useful tool can be found in the setup of Salesforce. For using Reporting Snapshots, you need a report, an object and a scheme.
report
A report entails the information you want to report about, like the amount of active structural agreements.
object
You also need an object, a place where the aggregate information of the report is stored. This object has to be created, but mostly a combination of the reporting date and a numerical field for the total amount of records suffices.
Reporting date: 2020-10-01Amount of structural agreements 13.560Rapportagedatum: 2020-11-01Amount of structural agreements: 13.740et cetera.
Scheme
Lastly, you need a scheme that encompasses how often a new shot of the report will be made. This can be daily, weekly or monthly.
The result
The result is an object where periodically a relevant number will be registered. Make a report or a dashboard of this object and boom!: see trends based on current and historical data at a glance!
Want to get started with Reporting Snapshots? Reach out to support@gcompany.nl!
