Getting insights on the vital enterprise key metrics to help businesses to understand changing business conditions visually. It allows businesses to make decisions based on the information that they have gathered from various reports. Using these dashboard help business users to discover customer trends and channels in which customers engage etc.

With a pre-designed Dashboard configured for the Sales team, unlock the power to dive deep into data, slide, and dice data to get essential insights that enable to make smarter decisions.

So, where do we start?

We have the enterprise architecture vision unlocking the technical potential to achieve business drivers to deliver business strategy. Make sure to benchmark that business success measurement as part of the business case. 

As part of technology exploration, make sure you have the right tools to benchmark business measures and the ability to change the lens to get the right meaning complete information from the data gathered across the landscape.

Salesforce provides robust product capabilities to help businesses to get insights into data. Salesforce provides a wealth of information to business users to cater operational reporting, real-time snapshot of data, summaries data sets, etc.

Interestingly Salesforce is always one step further. Salesforce embeds analytics right within the business processes with the introduction of Tableau CRM.

Let’s have a quick look at the various Salesforce product capabilities which can simplify and accelerated its reporting processes.

Before we start a quick note,

Salesforce is a business user’s platform. The business expects smooth functioning of the Salesforce platform without any performance degradation. Ensure you have proper data archiving policies in place and keep only necessary data in Salesforce to perform business functions. Piling up data continuously in Salesforce makes the platform bit slower, e.g., slower execution of queries or reports. However, there are multiple ways to improve query performance, but in the long term better to have a proper archival strategy.

Lets start with the Salesforce Product Capabilities.

1. Salesforce Standard Report

2. Salesforce Custom Report Types

Explore Custom Report Types when the standard report is not able to solve business needs.

Please take note of the limitations of Salesforce reports and Dashboard, which are available here. If you experience performance degradations with reports and dashboards, consider Custom indexing, Skinny tables, filter based on index fields, selecting criteria

3. Snapshot Reporting

Snapshot reporting is the solution for you if you need the static report of aggregated data or are interested in a summary of aggregated data. You need to create a new custom report that includes the fields you want to load as records into the target custom object.

Keep in mind a few limitations:

• Maximum number of rows you can insert into a custom object is 2,000. 
• Maximum number of runs you can store is 200. 
• Maximum number of source report columns you can map to target fields is 100

4. Salesforce Data Pipeline

Allow you to consolidate, aggregate, and calculate results based on CRM data and external data

Learn more about Salesforce Data Pipeline here.

5. Historical Trend Reporting

It uses a specialized custom report type designed to highlight changes between five snapshot dates. It also provides a mechanism to represent the data changes in charts and on dashboards visually. It is only applicable to Forecast, cases, Opportunity and custom objects.

Please consider few limitations around historical tread reporting available here.

6. Tableau CRM

Some of the significant features of Tableau CRM Plus, which integrates descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analytics, include:

• Analytical Reporting
• Cross-Platform reporting
• High volume data reporting (Plus: 10 Billion, Growth (100 Million)
• Supports Shield, HIPPA compliance
• Security Predicate
• Sharing inheritance (Sync Salesforce Sharing)
• Copy security sharing of objects into Tableau CRM
• Built-in connector to connect to local or remote Salesforce
• Integration and security user (Row-level security – access to user object)

Keep in mind few product limitations before the implementation:

Few additional considerations:

1. If you would like to have reporting in the customer community, think about licensing impact. Reporting is only available in Customer Community Plus and Partner Community licenses.

2. If you want to show reporting in the customer community, try to see if a list view in the community can be an option instead of purchasing Customer Community plus or partner community licenses.

3. In case if the business is requesting public reporting, consider using API to retrieve data from Salesforce or other platforms and present data using lightning components  in customer community. Bear in mind about API limits and try to cache in the middleware if possible to reduce API footprint

4. Reporting API available on the Salesforce platform, Click here for more information,

5. Tableau CRM REST API provides a robust mechanism to fetch data programmatically

6. BIG Object Reporting – When dealing with large amounts of data and billions of entries, creating reports or dashboards directly from the data is impractical. Instead, create a query in Async SOQL that retrieves a smaller, representative subset of the data you’re interested in. This functional dataset may be saved as a custom object and then used in reports, dashboards, and other Lightning Platform features.

7. Do not forget to check out Appexchange products for any special business requirements. There are plenty of Appexchange products to rescue you.

8. Verify licensing impact for each solution that you are considering.

To conclude, Meaningful analytics necessitates the capacity to produce fresh perspectives and make those perspectives available to those who need them at the right time and in the right manner.