Reports in salesforce

In any business reports are very important. Reports will provide clear picture to the management.

Management uses the reports to track progress towards its various goals, control expenditure and increase revenue. Reports help to predict trends and this is advantage of increasing profits.

In Salesforce.com we can easily generate reports in different style. And can create reports in very short time and also we schedule the reports. Salesforce provides a powerful suit of analytic tools to help you organize, view and analyze your data.

In Salesforce we can Create 4 types of report formats

1. Tabula Reports: Simple listing of data without any subtotals. This type of reports provide you most basically to look your data. Use tabular reports when you want a simple list or a list of items with a grand total.

Example: This type of reports are used to list all accounts, List of contacts, List of opportunities…..etc.….

2. Summary Reports: This type of reports provide a listing of data with groupings and sub totals. Use summary reports when you want subtotals based on the value of a particular field or when you want to create a hierarchically grouped report, such as sales organized by year and then by quarter.

Example: All opportunities for your team sub totaled by Sales Stage and Owner.

3. Matrix Reports: This type of reports allow you to group records both by row and by column. A comparison of related totals, with totals by both row and column. Use matrix reports when you want to see data by two different dimensions that aren’t related, such as date and product.

Example: Summarize opportunities by month vertically and by account horizontally.

4. Joined Reports: Blocks of related information in a single report. This type of reports enable you to adopt five different blocks to display different types of related data. Each block can own unique columns, summary fields, formulas, filters and sort order. Use joined reports to group and show data from multiple report types in different views.

Example: You can build a report to show opportunity, case and activity data for your accounts.

What is Dashboard?

Dashboard is the graphical representation of the data generated by a report or multiple reports. Dashboard component types can be charts, tables, gauges, metrics, or other components that you can create with VisualForce.