What Is Historical Trend Reporting In Salesforce?
Salesforce Historical Trend Reporting is a feature that allows you to analyze historical data trends within standard and custom reports, charts, and dashboards in Salesforce. This feature enables you to track changes and patterns in your data over time using existing standard and custom objects within Salesforce.
Historical Trend Reporting uses a special custom report type designed to focus on changes between five snapshot dates, for example, five business days or five business weeks. The changes in data can be visually represented in tables, charts and dashboards. Salesforce preserves historical data for four months i.e. three previous months and the current month.
Main Differences Between Reporting Snapshots & Historical Trending Reports
Historical trending and reporting snapshots in Salesforce are both methods for analyzing historical data, but they serve different purposes and have distinct features. Here's a comparison of the two:
Historical Trending Reports:
Purpose:
Historical trending in Salesforce allows you to view historical data trends within standard and custom reports, charts, and dashboards. It provides a way to analyze changes and patterns in your data over time without creating a separate custom object to store historical data.
Data Source:
Historical trending uses standard and custom objects in Salesforce, and it leverages the existing data structure without the need for additional custom objects or snapshots.
Granularity:
Historical trending provides real-time historical data analysis, which means you can see trends up to the current moment.
Use Cases:
It is suitable for situations where you want to quickly analyze historical data within the context of your standard Salesforce reporting tools, such as tracking changes in opportunities, leads, or cases over time.
Consideration:
Historical Trend Reports capture data for the previous three months, plus the current month data and have limited snapshot intervals. However you have the ability to report on retroactive historical data after you set them up.
Reporting Snapshots:
Purpose:
Reporting snapshots in Salesforce are specifically designed for capturing and storing historical data at scheduled intervals. They are used for in-depth historical data analysis and long-term trend tracking.
Data Source:
Reporting snapshots use a dedicated custom object as a target to store historical data. They involve a two-step process: capturing data from a source report and saving it into the custom object.
Granularity:
Reporting snapshots provide a historical point-in-time view of data based on the schedule you define. They are not real-time and provide a snapshot of data at specific intervals.
Use Cases:
Reporting snapshots are ideal for situations where you need to maintain a historical archive of data over time and generate reports or dashboards to analyze historical trends in a structured and controlled manner. Common use cases include tracking sales performance, lead conversion rates, or inventory levels.
Consideration:
Report Snapshots will not have any historical data before you set them up.
Historical Trending Use Cases
Track Changes in Your Sales Pipeline: A historical report can help you monitor your company’s sales pipeline to make sure it contains enough activity to meet current and future sales goals. Compare historical and current values of key attributes of opportunities such as dates, amounts, and status, to see how your pipeline has changed over time. Commonly used assets are:
See how the pipeline has changed over time
Focus only on deals in your pipeline worth more than XX dollars
Find deals that have pushed out
Identify shrinking deals
See How Forecast Amounts Have Changed: Track and analyze your forecasting data to help you make more accurate forecasts, improve sales strategies, and optimize resource allocation based on historical trends and insights.
Track History for Cases: Monitor activity across cases and identify your case status changes in the last xx months of a case’s life cycle. Leveraging historical trend reports allows you to gain valuable insights into your case management processes and performance over time. This data-driven approach can help you improve customer support, optimize workflows, and make informed decisions related to case management.
Setting Up Historical Trending Reports In Salesforce
Enable Historical Trending:
From Setup, enter Historical Trending in the Quick Find box, then select Historical Trending. Select the object that you want to do historical trend reporting on.You can select Opportunities, Cases, Forecasting Items, and up to 3 custom objects. Select Enable Historical Trending.
Configure Historical Data:
Narrow down the amount of data that’s captured for historical trend reporting by using the filters under Configure Data. You can narrow down historical data for Opportunities, Cases, and custom objects. For Forecasting Items, the available data is selected for you.
Select Fields:
Under Select Fields, choose up to 8 fields to make available for historical trend reporting. For Opportunities reporting, 5 fields are preselected: Amount, Close Date, Forecast Category, Probability, and Stage. You can add 3 more. For Forecasting, all 8 available fields are pre-selected.
Click Save
After you enable historical trending, a new report type is available when you create future reports. For example, if Opportunities is enabled for historical trending, a new report called “Opportunities with Historical Trending” is available when you create a report. If you enable historical trending on a new field, that field is automatically added to the historical trending report layout.
For opportunities, historical data is collected even if historical trending isn’t enabled. If historical trending is enabled, the historical reports include all the data for the specified time range, including data from prior to when historical trending was enabled.
Things To Consider
When implementing historical trend reporting in Salesforce, there are several important considerations to keep in mind to ensure a successful setup and effective use of this feature:
Your window for trend data in Salesforce only goes back three months.
Each historical trend report can contain up to 100 fields.
Formula fields aren’t supported.
Row limit filters aren’t supported.
The summary report format isn’t supported.
You can only choose up to five historical snapshot dates in each historical trend report.