Historical Trend Reporting is a niche reporting feature that allows for reporting on the standard up-to-the-minute state of the business as well as analyze day-to-day & week-to-week changes in forecasts, cases, opportunities, or values in custom objects. Historical Trend Reporting uses a special custom report type designed to focus on changes between five snapshot dates, for example, five business days or five business weeks. The changes in data can be visually represented in tables, charts and dashboards. Salesforce preserves historical data for four months i.e. three previous months and the current month.
A common use case of Historical Trend Reporting is to help monitor an organization’s sales pipeline to ensure it consists of enough activities to meet current and future sales goals. It can highlight deals whose value increased or decreased in the last three months or deals that moved into or out of a given target period.
These reports can compare historical and current values of key aspects of opportunities, such as status, amounts and dates, to see how the sales pipeline has changed over time. Historical Trend Reporting can help focus on deals over a given value. For example, if you want to only highlight deals in your pipeline that are worth more than $10,000, Historical Trend Reporting can filter out any deal worth more than $10,000 in the set timeframe.
Moreover, Historical Trend Reporting can identify deals that have been pushed out i.e. those taking more time to close than anticipated. It can also help identify shrinking deals. For example, targeting the deals in the sales pipeline that have decreased in value since yesterday. The report shows you the deals whose value was greater yesterday than today.
Some limitations/considerations for using Historical Trending are:
· Salesforce retains data only for the last three months and the current month.
· Each Historical Trend Report can accommodate up to 11 fields. In Opportunities reports, it includes the standard pre-selected fields which cannot be disabled.
· Formula Fields are not supported.
· The Summary report format is not supported.
· The Report Wizard is not supported. Historical Trend Reports can be created only with the Report Builder.