One of the most important reasons to track your projects in Salesforce is the ability to report on the measurable data that your projects generate. Whether you want to produce reports on the volume of tickets created by customer, the number of hours billed against a project, or the revenue generated by a certain kind of task, building Salesforce reports can help you leverage your Cloud Coach objects to improve your business processes.

What Is a report?

A report is a list of records that meet the criteria you define. It’s displayed in rows and columns, and can be filtered, grouped, or displayed in a graphical chart. When creating reports you control what information you see, and based on the criteria you enter, what records will be displayed and how the user will see that information. You can also add graphical representations of the data to your report.

How Are Reports Organized?

All reports are stored in folders, the level of access to the folder determines who can view, edit, run, and delete the report contained in that folder.  Access can be public, hidden, or shared.

Salesforce Report Setup

Before you begin building your report, you should determine what you want to measure. Each report can have a primary object, and one or more related objects. You must first determine what should be the primary object in your report. You can then decide if you need secondary objects in your report. Once you have your primary and secondary objects selected you can choose whether to display primary records if they do not have a secondary object. For example, you could have a report for Projects, or a report showing Projects with Tickets. In this case, project is the primary object and the tickets are the related objects. You can choose whether to show all projects, or just projects that have tickets.

Salesforce Report Types

There are four different report formats you can choose from. Tabular A tabular report is a simple and quick way to view data.  

1. Tabular: These reports are similar to a spreadsheet and contain information listed in rows with the fields you selected to display. Tabular reports cannot have charts.

2. Summary: A summary report is much like a tabular report, however it allows users to group rows of data, view subtotals, and create charts.

3. Matrix: A matrix reports allow you to group and summarize data by both rows and columns. you can choose to display the underlying data, or just show the data table. It is a great way to compare totals, particularly if you have a large amount of data. Matrix reports display as row and column headers, then totals within the body of the table. A matrix report is similar to a PivotTable in Excel.

4. Joined : Joined reports let you create multiple blocks of report data in one report. Each block is a separate sub-report with its own fields, columns, sorting, and filtering.

Creating a Report

As a Salesforce app, Cloud Coach objects, such as Projects, Tasks and Tickets, have the same reporting capabilities and functions as standard Salesforce objects. Creating a report is easy when you use the Salesforce Drag-and-Drop Report Builder. On the left of the page is the field list, and at the top of the page is the list of filters. In the center of the page you can see a preview of the report you are creating.