Mastering Salesforce Reports and Dashboards

Chapter 10. Custom Report Types

Report types provide the data foundation for all reporting in Salesforce. You saw in Chapter 4 that when creating a report, you have to select a report type to get started and that there are about 75 standard report types to choose from in your system. This first choice in report building defines the scope of which records and columns will be available in your report. It determines which objects are included and how they are joined together. The odds are good that you will end up needing more options than the initial 75 report types, and this is where custom report types play an important role.

The list of use cases for custom report types spans across all departments in your organization, and grows with the custom functionality you build out in your system. You can use them to create the foundations for account-based marketing (ABM) reporting, such as accounts with or without opportunities, and accounts with or without activities. You can use them for support, to show all cases and their comments, whether or not there are any comments. Administrators may also want to create a list of all dashboards and their components.

Custom report types allow us control over which objects are available in reports and how the objects are joined. You can also use them to reveal fields from other related objects that are not normally visible when using standard report types.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to create, use, and manage custom report types and understand ...