Basis of reporting

Reporting is one of the most-used features in salesforce, but users and admins have seen that either:

• the standard reports are not exactly what they want
• and that when building a report through the wizard, they see either too many or too few fields

In these cases, traditionally, the user has had few options, and the admin has either had to use the Excel Add-in, or use a partner solution.

Custom Report Types

Custom Report Types allow a user with "view setup" and the permission in their profile to create custom report types to build the flow through the report wizard. You might want to give this permission to users with advanced reporting requirements, because you don't need to be an administrator to create these CRTs (Custom Report Types).

The user chooses the CRT in the report wizard, just as they choose the report type today. In previous release for example, they could choose the "Accounts and Contacts" report type category:

The user has a list of the report types that are based on the Account and the Contact objects. With CRTs, when using the report wizard, the user has access to all the standard report types, as well as any new CRTs that are published.

Building a Custom Report Type

There are two general categories of CRTs:

• Those similar to existing report types, just with different fields (for instance, to add in "opportunity owner role", or to remove all the unused fields)
• New Report Types

In the first case, you can copy the objects used in the standard report, and work with the user requesting the report type to choose the extra fields. Fields accessible via records which are related through a lookup relationship (see the blog post "First Custom Report Type" for a guide on how to do that)

In the second case, you should look at:

• What object is the most important, and the object from which records should be returned under any circumstances. Also, the scope choices "e.g. My, My team, All" are on this object.
• Which other objects are related lists of this one do you want to report on
• which fields from objects related via lookup to those chosen for the 2 reasons above you want to include.

The ways you can make reporting better for your users

• CRT will allow you to make a simpler report wizard experience for users that only care about a few specific fields
• If you want to report on fields that are not in the standard report types but related to the objects, CRT will let you create a report type including fields from lookups
• CRT creation wizard includes fileds that are only present currently in the API
• If you want to report on more than 2 related custom objects, you can create a hierarchy of 4 using CRT.

Example - reducing fields:

Here, I've built a CRT based on Accounts and Contacts. I've removed all the address fields, because my telesales people only need phone numbers and states.
We base the report type on Accounts.

Then choose to relate accounts to contacts for the results we'll want.

Here, I've used the field layout on the Custom Report Type to remove many of the fields:

And here's the result in the report wizard -  a much simpler experience for these users.

The same fields, in the same sections will be available in the filtering, and the date fields here will be used in the date filters in resulting reports.

More information is available in the help, or in articles on the Analytics blog - blogs.salesforce.com/analytics

Contributed by Thomas Tobin