Leveraging report subscriptions and row-level formulas in Salesforce
The problem
I was chatting with several colleagues recently about how we manage our “to do” lists. We have sticky notes stuck around our office, digital sticky notes on our desktops, and a variety of reminders that we set for ourselves in our calendars. While all of these methods are going to remain in my bag of tricks, I recently found extra joy in setting up subscriptions to reports in Salesforce that will send me an email when there is an action I need to take.
We track many things in our internal Salesforce instance. For example, we track contract expiration dates and the expiration date of every team member’s badge at customer sites. The badges are always a headache, especially for larger teams where the badge expiration dates occur scattered throughout the year. Now, however, whenever a badge is within 30 days of expiration I receive a report from Salesforce that lets me know I need to take action and make sure the team member has started the renewal process. Let’s walk through how this works.
Setting up the report
We start with a basic report. This lists the names of my team members and the expiration date of each of their badges. I’ve further grouped the report by badge expiration date because they tend to get issued in clusters.
Since I only want to focus on team members who badges will expire in the next 30 days, I will add a “Row-Level Formula” to the report.
I’m going to pick an “if” statement to get me started. This statement simply checks “if” the badge expiration date is more than 30 days out. If yes, the value is 0, if no, the value is 1.
IF((Contact.Badge_Expiration_Date__c-TODAY())>30, 0, 1)
Now you can see the finished product. Salesforce adds a little summary column to my report that signals I have 4 team members with badges expiring soon.
Adding conditional formatting
In order to help highlight which rows need attention, I am also going to add “Conditional Formatting.” This option is available in the bottom right hand side of the screen when “Group Rows” is configured in a report. I’m going to set up my formatting to only highlight in red the group I need to pay attention to.
Now we can see that the team members with badges expiring in the next 30 days have a red highlight to help draw my eyes to the grouping.
Configuring the subscription
Next, I would like to configure my email subscription. The subscription button is part of the “Edit” dropdown in the Reports.
There are a couple of options for the subscription. Subscriptions can be set up to trigger on “Record Count” and on the Row-Level Formula. We will rely on the Row-Level Formula for this example.
Here I can set up the report to notify me once per week at 6 a.m. on Mondays. This helps me monitor who requires action and helps me stay on track.
Conclusion
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