Salesforce Reports and Dashboards

Reports and Dashboard Capabilities. 

Dashboards

I’m starting with Dashboards because they can be easily explained. Dashboards are collections of individual reports, and you can make as many dashboards as you want in Salesforce. 

Dashboards often work best with reports that have charts because dashboards were designed to be highly visual and informative at a glance. Tables can also be added to dashboards, though. While viewing a dashboard, you can click on any of the displayed reports to open it up and get more detail.

Reports

Reports can do almost anything you need them to, and you can make as many as you want.

The primary limitation of reports is almost always going to be the underlying data (whether it was collected at all and whether the data is accurate) rather than reporting functionality.

To start, I’ll show some useful reports and explain a bit about each of them. Then, I’ll dive deeper into Salesforce’s powerful reporting capabilities and the types of reports you can create.

And remember, the beauty of setting up Reports and Dashboards in Salesforce is that once you’ve done so, you don’t need to do it again. You simply save the report and revisit it to see the most up-to-date data available.

The Components of a Report

Let me explain the basics of what goes into creating a report with a graph by guiding you through the creation of a report about outcomes.

Nonprofits have many important stories to tell, and one of the most important is about their impact.

A common feature that I build and tailor to the specific requirements of each nonprofit I support is around logging outcomes.

In the example below, this outcome is one that is tied to a client.

Each staff person documents their client outcomes in Salesforce. Each outcome contributes to a master list of outcomes can be accessed and summarized to make a report. 

So we have a big list of all the Outcomes shown in the image below. There are many more outcomes than this (a client can have multiple outcomes), but they don’t fit in this screenshot.

But just having a big list is often not very helpful. Let’s say we want to know how many cases of a specific type of outcome were logged in the past few months. We can summarize the outcomes by “Outcome Type” as well as by month which allows us to see the totals for each Outcome Type over the past few months. We end up with a summarized table like the one below.

And from here, we can add a graph that represents the table. A linear graph, like the one below, allows us to take note of any Outcome Type trends over time.

This is an example of how to create a basic report with a graph in Salesforce.

Charts and Comparisons

Data is often most useful when it’s compared against other data, such as comparing current data to previous data, or comparing actual performance to goals. It can help you understand patterns as well as notice deviations.  

The report below shows the cumulative number of program hours worked, aggregated by month. Each month contains three different bars representing (1) last year’s program hours, (2) this year's program hour goal, and (3) this year’s actual program hours. 

There’s a simple story being told by this graph – that things are going according to schedule with small but significant improvements over last year, and we are exceeding our goal by just a bit.

This data below in the pie chart is aggregated by the time log sub-code (think of it as different billing codes for different kinds of services) and how much revenue that subcode is bringing in. Because all the time is logged into Salesforce, it’s easy to slice and dice it to gain insights. Imagine having the ability to see real-time data like this that will help you decide how to allocate resources and make important decisions.

The story being told here is that the 889-FAZ sub-code is pulling a lot of weight for this organization. And you can see the exact amounts and proportions allowing for different kinds of budgeting and forecasting insights.

Reports for Meeting External Obligations

You probably have to generate data in specific formats for many reasons: accounting, billing, funder requirements, compliance, and much more.

A common thorny and frustrating report that nonprofits need to generate for multiple reasons is a report allocating payroll hours and other expenses to specific cost centers.

Often when I help a new client migrate to Salesforce, they’re able to save many days per year of time-consuming and tedious work around allocations. I had one Executive Director tell me that moving to Salesforce and using the reports I set up for her organization saves her 250 hours per year! That kind of ease of mind and efficiency not only saves money and time but also helps maintain morale.

An example of an allocation report with cost centers looks something like this.

Here’s another example. Other nonprofits I work with have needs around specific billing formats. 

They’re able to get reimbursed for the services they provide and they need data on the number of hours they work for each client on each day of the month. Each cell should contain the total number of hours worked with that client on that day. 

This report below is effortlessly summing up the time spent on each client in such a manner. And again, this report is always drawing from the most recent data in Salesforce automatically.

Another nonprofit has very similar needs – knowing how many hours of service were provided to each client on each day of the month. But they need different formatting. The report below shows just the number of the day of month (rather than the date). Additionally, sometimes the values represent hours worked, and sometimes they represent dollars spent. I show these two similar reports next to each other to show that we can get the formatting just right, depending on the need.

Summarizing by Different Time Intervals

Here’s another very common report. We want to see how many new clients we’ve taken on over the past few months. We can create this report from a few different angles. The simplest most overarching way is to display the total number of new Contacts created over that time period. Here we can see we've had 96 new contacts in the past two months.

But let’s say we want to see how many were created each month. In less than a minute, with just a few clicks, we can create that report too.

Or we could look at weekly trends for new clients.

The sky is the limit here. We can group data by week, month, quarter, and many more options. We can even see by day in the month. Let’s expand our time range to 6 months, and see which day is most popular for new clients. Looks like the 7th of each month!

Changing Graph Dimensions and “Bucketing” Values

Now let’s look at a report all about donations and donors.

This graph below shows the amount of donations by “Donation Type” and also month by month (Jan 2022 - May 2022). Each bar represents the total donations for the month broken down by “Donation Type” into different colors. 

There’s a lot happening in this graph below and many stories to be told. 

January is a big giving month for this organization. Website-PayPal significantly dropped off after Feb. Direct Deposit donations are all over the board.

It might be helpful to analyze this data a few different ways.

With just a few clicks, we can reorganize the data so that each bar now represents the total donations for each “Donation Type”, broken down by month shown in different colors. If it weren’t clear from the first graph, this organization far and away gets most of their donations through checks.

Now let’s look at the data another way by combining some of the donation types. We’ll combine similar categories: (1) “Website - PayPal” and “Website - Stripe”; (2) “Credit Card” and “Envelope-CC”; and (3) “EFT” and “Direct Deposit”. Creating a report with these “aggregates” only takes a few minutes.

Things look a bit different now. We can see that the website aggregate evens out a lot more from month to month. January was huge for credit card aggregate, followed by a tiny February. The direct deposit aggregate was very slow in Jan and Feb and then really picked up in March and beyond. 

And we can also put these three reports onto a single dashboard so we can look at them together in just a few seconds.

Tracking Important Numbers

Every nonprofit has important dates and numbers they need to keep track of. 

Some of my clients are authorized to work a predetermined number of hours for each client, They cannot go over this number without getting prior authorization. It’s vital for these nonprofits to not go over hours and ask for additional hours with enough time to spare.

Salesforce allows for many ways to track this incredibly important metric. Alerts can be set to notify the right people when an individual client is running low on hours (more on these kinds of notifications in the next part in this series). 

Another key way to track something like this is to have a report that shows clients nearing or over their allotted hours. This report below shows clients who have 8 hours or less remaining on their hours authorizations.

Another common situation nonprofits face is needing to track particular dates as they approach. Maybe you have reports coming due for clients. Maybe you need to renew something. Maybe a contract is running out. There are many reasons.

With Salesforce, you can easily create a report that shows you what’s coming due. This report below indicates which clients have service authorizations ending less than two months away.

Another report based on dates shows active clients who have not received service in 10 days or more. This report ensures that no client goes without service for too long.

The possibilities with creating reports are endless and have helped nonprofits avert many crises.

You can access these reports whenever you’d like, and there are also ways to have reports automatically sent to you daily, weekly, or monthly. This way, they can land in your inbox without you having to remember to look them up yourself.

Automatically Emailing Reports

Here’s an example of the report that shows a deadline coming up for clients. It also includes a link to view the original report within Salesforce.

Conclusion

I find that about 95% of requests for new reports that I receive are very straight-forward to complete and can normally be set up within 15-20 minutes. The remaining 5% of requests can be completed but require a bigger time investment because the raw data needs to go through advanced calculations before being generated as a report. 

But again, once the initial setup is done, generating these reports normally take less than a minute. I have yet to come across a request for a report or dashboard so wild that it can’t be handled, and I’m always looking for a new challenge!

Book a free 15 minute call with me to chat about your organization and what kinds of reports could be in your future. 

And also please keep reading to dive deeper into what Salesforce has to offer!