Standard Salesforce reporting provides several different options for you to analyze and present your data. However, when you want to start to look at your data from a historical point in time – to start to understand trends – what do you do? A few years ago Salesforce rolled out a feature titled “Reporting Snapshots” to provide this functionality to Orgs.
What is Reporting Snapshots?
Reporting Snapshots allow you to automatically capture periodic point-in-time summaries, from various different data types, and then deliver those summaries in a way that allows you to do comparative analysis & trend reporting. Summary reports have always been available in Salesforce reports, however that only allowed you to view the data at a specific time. Now we can look at the same data type across several different points in time.
Some of the most common use cases for Reporting Snapshots:
o Understanding Case opened and Case closed volumes
o Average turnaround time on Case
o Opportunity Pipeline trends by Team or by Rep
o Monitor Forecast Accuracy
o Average age of Opportunities from Open to Close
o Sales Rep activity numbers by Month or Quarter
o Analyze employee workload (# of Tasks,Events,Cases, etc)
Once Reporting Snapshots begins to capture that historical data – you can then start to turn to Salesforce Dashboards and make it visual. Once applied to dashboards, management can start to visually understand trends and see where change/attention needs to take place. Reporting snapshots is a feature that our team has used to solve many different solutions, and we encourage everyone to consider implementing this feature at some level.