Reporting and analytics drive informed decision-making at organizations. Executives rely heavily on reported information and leverage metrics to best support their organization’s mission. Managers and staff depend on data to guide daily processes. In the social sector, decision-making processes are exceptionally important because they help us better serve our communities.
Salesforce administrators have the significant responsibility of effectively distributing the right information, to the right people, at the right time. Fortunately, Salesforce offers deep out of the box reporting functionality. In this post, we will discuss how to share and subscribe to reports – ultimately improving efficiency in your organization’s decision-making process.
Share Folders
On Salesforce, sharing reports occurs at the folder level. As an admin, there are two benefits to sharing folders. The first is obvious – to share reports with users who need the information. The other is to restrict sensitive information, so that only approved individuals can access specific data and functionalities. There are three levels of access available for report folders:
- View. Users can see reports, but are not able to make any changes to the information.
- Edit. Users can view and modify reports as well as move them to other folders they have access to.
- Manage. Users can control access and make changes to the folder.
Assigning the appropriate access level to users will maintain data integrity and security at your organization. Once an admin is certain about who should receive the report, and to what capacity, they can easily share the folder and schedule reports.
For more information read Compare Access Levels for Report and Dashboard Folders.
Subscribe to Reports in Salesforce Lightning
There are two ways to subscribe to reports, depending on whether you are in Salesforce Lightning or Classic. In Lightning, an admin can subscribe a user, or team of users, to a specific report that will run at a scheduled time. This allows for automated distribution, removing the need to manually run and send the report.
When subscribing, Salesforce will give the option to identify the ‘running user’. The running user’s access rights will determine what data is shown to all recipients. This means, that users may see more (or less) information than they normally would. If, for example, you have access to sensitive information as an admin, you may want to select another running user to ensure only appropriate data is shared.
For more information read Subscribe Users, Groups, and Roles to Reports in Lightning Experience.
Subscribe to Reports in Salesforce Classic
In Salesforce Classic, users can subscribe to receive an email notification based on an exact metric or a specific change to a report. Similar to subscribing in Lightning, the report will be scheduled to run at particular times. The notification, however, is only triggered when a set of conditions are met. There are three factors taken into account when setting a condition on a Salesforce report:
- Aggregate. This is the basis of your condition. It can be record count, average amount, or sum of account, among others.
- Operator. This is the rule for comparison. Identify if your value should be greater than, less than, equal to, or not equal to the aggregate.
- Value. This is the number that you will be comparing your aggregate to.
Subscribing to notifications in this capacity automates the distribution of a critical data point – allowing users to stay up-to-date on important changes without spending any part of their day hitting the refresh button on the report screen.
For more information read Subscribe to Get Report Notifications in Salesforce Classic.
Summary + Conclusion
Salesforce offers out of the box options for sharing data effectively. An administrator can automate the distribution of critical information by sharing folders and subscribing users to reports. By leveraging these tools, admins play an important role in improving the decision-making process at their organization.