Integrating Salesforce Custom Reports & Salesforce Custom Links, Part 1

Have you ever wanted to run a Salesforce Custom Report directly from a record? Maybe you would like a mailing address report for all of the Salesforce Contacts associated to the Salesforce Account you are viewing. Or how about all Salesforce Opportunities with Contact Roles associated to the Salesforce Account you are viewing? Or possibly all of the cases associated to the Salesforce Contact or Account you are viewing?

By combining your custom reports with Custom Links that you create, all users can run the reports above and more. No more having to run a report and then customizing it for each record that you want the information on. With a few steps by a Salesforce administrator, those reports can be just one click away, since the user is already viewing the record.

Part 1 will cover deciding what kind of Salesforce Custom Report you need to run and what information should be included.

Decide what kind of Custom Salesforce Report you need:

For our example, let’s say that our Account Executives need to know all of the Contacts listed in the “Contact Roles” related list of all Opportunities associated to a given Account. We would start by creating a new custom “Opportunities with Contact Roles” report.

Decide what Information should be in your Salesforce Custom Report:

Set up the Salesforce Custom Report with the columns and grouping (like Opportunity Name) that you like and then we need to make some decisions about the standard filters. Since the Salesforce Custom Links will be used by multiple users, on multiple records, you may want to set the “Show” filter to “All Opportunities” instead of “My Opportunities”. The final output to your users will be based on your sharing rules and other security settings.

The “Include” filter should be set to your preference at this time (Any, Open only, Closed only, Won only or Lost only) as well as the “Date Field” and “Range”. Remember that this link and report will be used by multiple users so you may want to set the filters to “Any” and “All Time”.

In part 2, we’ll cover adding filters to your Salesforce Custom Report, saving it, and getting it ready for Salesforce Custom Links.

Looking for other ways you can optimize Salesforce? Check out Salesforce Optimization Service.

StarrData helps you get the most out of Salesforce. If you would like information on the services we offer, call us at (888) 391-4493 x103.