Enhance your Salesforce reporting with Reporting Snapshots

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.

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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)

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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.