With Salesforce’s historical trend reporting, you can track and manage key performance indicators (KPIs) like Opportunities, Leads, or Forecasts and have the real-time data you need. While there are limitations to what Salesforce can do regarding trend reporting, the multivariate benefits to your organization make this powerful tool worth its weight in gold!

Read on to discover some of the benefits of historical trend reporting within your Salesforce org and how CapStorm is here to help you overcome the limitations that go with it. 

What is Historical Trend Reporting?

At its core, the historical trend reporting tool tracks how field values have changed over time in Salesforce. This uses a unique custom report type to focus on changes between five snapshot dates, for example, five business days. One of the critical things about the feature is how it allows you to view those data changes in several formats – such as charts or tables. 

Historical Trend Reporting Gives Insights Into Your Organization

With this caliber of functionality at your disposal, leadership will be better equipped to make important operational decisions. Here are some of the ways it can impact your decision-making process:

• Evaluate if forecasting changes are needed – When it comes to your organization’s sales forecast, this feature can give you the data you need to evaluate how effective your future sales projections are. Salesforce Trend Reports outline data by stage, person, and month, providing an accurate look at organizational changes. 
• Get a full scope of your pipeline – Monitoring pipeline activity over time allows leadership to identify any trends that might impact business. This includes the ability to see if any deals have been taking longer than expected to close, which may necessitate lowering expectations in a given period. In addition, you’ll be able to see if the data supports company goals over time and whether any pivots need to be made to achieve the desired results. 
• Efficiently manage the overall value of your deals – With historical trend reporting at your fingertips, you can view whether some of your arrangements are increasing or decreasing in value and address those concerns as needed. This gives leadership the data required to address any immediate concerns with deals and improve sales on a case-by-case basis. By quickly identifying these problems, more effective business decisions can be made.

There are Limitations in Salesforce

To return the data more efficiently, Salesforce has some critical limitations to historical trend reporting that users should be aware of. Here are a few of the more important ones regarding the data your business needs to function correctly:

• 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.

Some of these Salesforce reporting timeframe restrictions can affect the data you’ll have insight into, leading to less visibility for making critical business decisions. Check out Salesforce’s handy list of all the limitations for more information.

Bypass Salesforce Reporting Roadblocks with CapStorm

A key advantage of CapStorm’s Salesforce integrations is that our software enables you to analyze your Salesforce data over virtually any period while supporting exhaustive field history tracking off-platform. By having access to more extended periods of data on your forecasts, pipeline, and business changes, you’ll have a better mindset to accurately forecast the requirements of your organization to expand upon any growth or address any long-term concerns you have discovered.

When using exhaustive field history tracking, there are no limitations on the number of historical versions of a given record you can retain. Some of our customers have found this even leads to the ability to eliminate data silos while achieving cross-environment reporting.

With CapStorm’s integrations and reporting solutions, you can quickly gain an industry edge by enabling data based on more extended historical trend reporting, giving you the power to make decisions that have been informed by the best insights your data can offer! From integration to Salesforce reporting, our vast solutions have helped our customers overcome their Salesforce roadblocks. See more of the outcomes CapStorm customers have experienced after trusting CapStorm with their Salesforce data management needs.

Salesforce’s historical trend reporting feature remains one of the best ways to analyze Salesforce data. You’ll soon discover all its benefits with proper insights and CapStorm at the helm.