How to create reports in Salesforce?

Finding business insights from your data in Salesforce is easy with the out-of-the-box reporting feature. In Salesforce you can create various kind of reports using your data. You can:

• Build and save reports
• Share reports with other users via shared folders
• Export reports into excel or CSV file format
• Subscribe reports regularly over email with conditional criteria
• Run reports on fly without saving

Important terms

1. Report Type: Its specifies the kind of data your are trying to report on. For ex: You want to report on all the deals processed in Salesforce for current fiscal year. In such situation you select the Deal/Opportunity report type. To report on deals that must have products, go for a report type called as “Opportunity with Products”.
2. Fields: Every report type contains set of fields (columns) from the respective report object/business data like – Deal/Opportunity. You can build your own custom report types for custom objects/data as needed.
3. Summary: You can summarise on important fields in a report using summary feature. For ex. you can summarise the amount column which adds an extra row with the summary results. Also, you can add Groupings to this summary like: “Show me total won amount by month in current fiscal year“. Groupings can be applied on rows and/or columns.
4. Filter: You can apply data criteria to narrow down your report. These criteria are called as Filters.
5. Charts: To have review the report visually, you can make use of report charts on fly.
6. Report Builder: Report builder is visual editor where you can configure and run reports in Salesforce lightning environment.

Hands on scenarios

After having a clear business query in mind, creating a report is very easy in Salesforce. We will look at below examples report scenarios from a video.

1. Report: All opportunities ordered by fiscal period in descending order.
2. Summary: Total amount grouped by fiscal period for all opportunities.
3. Filters: Show summary of closed won opportunity amount in Energy industry as per fiscal period.
4. Chart: Using a relevant chart, show closed won opportunities grouped by industry in respective fiscal years.

Demonstration

Resources

Official documentation: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.rd_reports_overview.htm&type=5