Creating Salesforce reports and dashboards is a function of this award winning CRM software that makes it so popular. The ease of configuration, customization and task creation which Salesforce inherently allows has earned it the title of “one of the best” CRM solutions ever created, and is also why similar designs by some of the bigger software companies like Microsoft and Sun just can’t seem to keep up.
Salesforce Reports and Dashboards Best Practices
However, the creation of dashboards and schedule reports salesforcecalls for some tact and logic, so that your layouts are easy to pick up, and reduce the confusion that comes with training and support of Salesforce due to intrinsic changes this sort of thing can cause.
Well, there are no set standards for creating these, and there are no mutually agreed upon best practices for them either, but as someone very familiar with Salesforce and the dashboard and report functionalities that it offers, I think I can offer you some sound advice to ensure that the problems with this kind of modification are greatly reduced as well as making avail of the conveniences as solidly as is possible.
Salesforce Dashboards
First, creating dashboards in salesforce. The first thing to do is be sure that the controls and buttons of your dashboard make sense in labeling and are consistent and easy to pick out. Don’t have redundant buttons leading to different parts of the same features, etc. This would be inefficient, and the crowd of buttons this spans is inhibiting at best.
Along with this, your dashboard may also be condensing some basic information or metrics out of Salesforce for a quick look, which is one of the conveniences of dashboards in general. That’s fine, but be sure to label the feeds coming in, and again, avoid redundancies or overload of information through these channels.
When your dashboards become more complex and fiddly than the system that runs them, they kind of defeat the point.
Additional information is available on how to create a dashboard in salesforce page.
Salesforce Reports
Now, on to reports. With reports, you’re creating a bit of a programming object, even though you don’t have to write code to do it. Be sure first that all the records and fields within records in your Salesforce have clear and obvious names, and that again, no redundancies are present. This allows the reports, where you align inclusions, exclusions and any basic mathematical summary operations being performed in the report, to make sense if someone has to look under the hood with them.
Also, it’s a good idea to make them alterable to administrators, but to lock them from peers, because the human desire to tinker can be a damning one with something like this.
Finally, regarding reports, you will want to give them very clear and obvious names and concise descriptions of purpose, so that people who need them will know they exist, and won’t waste time recreating what you have already built.
Conclusion
So, there’s not a lot to say about creating reports in salesforce and dashboards, because it’s mostly common sense, especially if you have any sense of UX design or form creation from previous software. However, it’s important to revisit this logic when given the power to create things like this, because we can very easily lose touch with practicality when we’re allowed to be creative.
