Your New Best Friend…Salesforce Custom Report Types

Blog:

As a Salesforce system administrator, you are no doubt tasked with creating reports. Salesforce does a good job of offering lots of report types for objects. But what if you need to create a report and just can’t seem to pull in the necessary data? My advice…try creating a custom report type.

Salesforce standard reports that pull data from more than one record will always be set up to show “Object A” with “Object B,” such as “Accounts with Contacts.” You won’t see a standard report that offers “Object A” with or without “Object B,” such as “Accounts with or without Contacts.” This can only happen through the creation of a custom report type. If you only search “Accounts with Contacts,” you may be missing out on some important data.

When creating custom report types, there are some things you should know:

1. Custom report types allow up to four related objects to be pulled into the same report: a primary object with up to three additional related objects.
2. When creating the custom report type, you’ll need to choose the relationship between the objects in the report (e.g. “Each ‘A’ record must have at least one related ‘B’ record or ‘A’ records may or may not have related ‘B’ records.”)
3. When creating the custom report, you can choose which fields on each object should be included as options to pull into the report. You can choose up to 60 object references and 1,000 fields total.
4. History fields, product schedule fields, and case age fields cannot be pulled into custom report types.
5. Once created, the primary object cannot be changed.
6. If you create new fields on an object after the custom report type is created, they will not appear in the list of fields to pull into the report. You must edit the custom report type to make those new fields available to pull into the report.
7. When selecting which fields to make available in the report type, you can choose the order in which they appear in the report builder.

Although standard report types will meet most of your reporting needs, custom report types can definitely come in handy and can quickly become your new best friend.