Posted By
Darren Love
on
16. November 2016 23:31
If you're unable to generate reports from your company's metrics, how can you effectively target your efforts to sell products to customers, keep your employees on track, or know how well your company is performing?
The ability to generate, automate, and customize reports is a powerful feature of many cloud-based CRM and ERP platforms. Quick and customizable report generation puts your data to use and gives you a clear overview of how you are doing and where you need to improve.

While a backlog of reports might indicate an overwhelming number of product orders, it may also be a sign of increasing inefficiency in your organization.
Benefits of bringing automation into report generation:
- Reduces labor cost of manual report generation. Automatization allows users to analyze and validate the data without involving IT specialists. Multiple data sources can be quickly combined in visually appealing charts or spreadsheets.
- Reduces information bottlenecks. Data can be customized to display on dashboards, giving managers a better insight into daily operations.
- Users can document KPIs and other essential information as needed.
- Makes data actionable (and avoids “data overload”) by allowing users to select pertinent information and take effective action on relevant metrics.
- Allows you to make better decisions more quickly. Decisions can be made swiftly once you have the essential information displayed in a digestible form.
Standard, customizable reports are available in many editions of Salesforce, allowing users to generate reports in a variety of formats.
Standard Salesforce Report types:
- 1. Account and Contact Reports provide details about active, neglected, or new accounts.
- 2. Activity Reports display information about open and completed activities.
- 3. Administrative Reports help you analyze your staff, documents, and pending approval requests.
- 4. Campaign Reports analyze and track your marketing efforts.
- 5. File and Content Reports show how users are engaging with files and Salesforce CRM Content.
- 6. Forecast Reports can be customized to provide a specific forecast.
- 7. Lead Reports show information about the source and status of leads.
- 8. Opportunity Reports can be customized to view a primary campaign source, forecast category, and synced quote.
- 9. Product and Asset Reports can be used to list the cases filed for an asset, or identify assets that aren’t associated with a product.
- 10. Self-Service Reports help you analyze the effectiveness of your self-service portal. Find out how many cases are being viewed, how many customers are logging in, or what customers think of the solutions you’re offering.
- 11. Reporting on Support Activity can track the number of cases created, case comments, case emails, case owners, case contact roles, cases with solutions, the length of time since the case last changed status or owner, and case history.
With its recently released Lightning Experience with Wave Analytics, Salesforce now offers a modern UI and impressive cloud-based features to make data and tools accessible from any device. Several time-saving report generation apps have also been added.
6 Salesforce apps that streamline report generation:
- 1. Conga Courier allows Salesforce reports to be scheduled or automatically sent to an unlimited number of people inside and outside your organization. Embed a report in an email or send as an attachment in Excel, CSV or Printable View.
- 2. Simple Visit Reports puts AI to work analyzing visit reports by reps and customers. Sales reps can report their visits; automated follow-up actions from the sales and marketing teams can also be scheduled from this app.
- 3. Aduno Light tracks project working hours, travel expenses, and generates reports based on major metrics to help you stay on top of your budget.
- 4. SpringCM Document Management allows you to generate or access any document from any device. Includes the ability to configure and send reports with native integration with Office 365. Additional third-party integrations with DocuSign, Adobe Sign, Conga, Drawloop, Xactly, Seal Software, and FoundationConnect are possible.
- 5. GaugeLabs Approval Analytics allows users to create approval reports and dashboards and schedule standard and custom reports. Approval Analytics can track pending, approved, and rejected records. Customizable reports allow you measure your approval process and observe any bottlenecks.
- 6. Apsona for Salesforce streamlines many types of data management tasks, including charting reports on dashboards and pivot tables.
Your edition and user licenses will determine if your organization can enable and use Lightning Experience.
AllianceTek: Empowering IT Solutions
AllianceTek provides a full range of software development solutions that will grow your business and align your people, processes, and systems. We offer a full range of Salesforce services from consultation to migration to implementation, support, and maintenance.
To learn more about how we will work with you, click here.