Reports & Dashboards are a powerful way to understand and visualize your data, and our reporting starts with Report Types. When you create a report in Salesforce, you first select the type of report you will create. Often the standard report types will meet your reporting needs, however sometimes we run into reporting limitations with our standard set of report types. If you aren’t able to create the report you need with the standard report types available, we can explore Custom Report Types.
Some examples of when Custom Report types are useful:
- Report on relationships from 3 objects, like an “Accounts with or without Opportunities with or without Activities report”.
- Include fields from objects that are related via lookup. In a Custom Report Type you can add fields from objects that are not your primary report type object, and can span up to 4 object relationships. An example would be including information about the role and profile of the opportunity owner, without listing the User object as one of your report type objects.
- When standard reports do not provide the “with” or “with and without” options you need for your report.
Watch this short video to see how to create a custom report in Salesforce!