Financial Reports & Dashboards in Salesforce: Your Step-by-Step Guide

Many finance teams are moving away from traditional business processes that involve spreadsheets and tedious reports and are integrating finance processes with customer relationship management (CRM) systems. This integration helps finance teams increase efficiency, improve collaboration, and optimize return on investment (ROI). In a unified business ecosystem where finance and CRM processes are linked, teams can easily access a 360-degree view of the customer, make informed decisions, and streamline business processes.

Thanks to Salesforce, teams don’t have to deal with spreadsheets and lifeless reports; Salesforce transforms your business with its all-in-one platform advantages. Automated processes in Salesforce help streamline operations, minimize manual tasks, and eliminate the risk of errors. Finance reports and dashboards in Salesforce are great for effective financial management and decision-making. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you navigate and optimize your use of financial reports and dashboards in Salesforce.

Step 1: Define Your Financial Objectives and Data Model

For using Salesforce reports and dashboards effectively, it’s important to understand your organization’s financial data model first – do you want to maximize revenue growth, optimize expense control, or maintain a healthy cash flow?

First, define your main financial goals. Key financial metrics (KPIs) typically tracked by finance departments include Sales Order Processing (SOP), Accounts Receivable Turnover Ratio (ART), Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), Revenue Growth Rate, Net Profit Margin, and Potential Cash Cycle.

These measurements may be necessary to make progress toward your goals. It will guide you in identifying the most relevant data points to define your goals, track progress, and make informed decisions. Once you have defined your objectives, identify key financial objects within your Salesforce instance, such as accounts, opportunities, and financial transactions.

Ensure that your Salesforce configuration accurately captures the necessary data to build powerful reports. With this foundation in place, you can tailor your approach to align with your specific financial data model, objectives, and team needs. This strategy ensures that your engagement with Salesforce aligns with your organizational goals and provides meaningful insights and data-driven decision-making capabilities.

Step 2: Build Powerful Reports

Salesforce provides finance teams with a robust reporting engine for creating custom reports tailored to their financial requirements. Explore various report types, such as tabular, summary, and matrix reports, then choose the one that aligns best with your needs. You can use standard, out-of-the-box financial reports such as aged receivables reports, real-time trial balance reports, and real-time profit and lost statements, or easily create your custom reports.

This ensures your finance team receives accurate, real-time financial statements, offering detailed insights into organizational performance for improved decision-making. Refine your reports by leveraging filters, groupings, and formulas to extract specific financial insights. Track key metrics over time, compare performance across different segments, and identify trends or outliers. Use filters and sorting options for focused analysis based on specific criteria.

Step 3: Leverage Formulas and Summary Fields

Take advantage of Salesforce formulas and summary fields to perform calculations directly within your reports. One of the tips is to directly create new formula fields on the Salesforce object rather than in each report individually. This approach will make it easier for you to maintain and update the formula once rather than having to update formula fields in every custom report.

For end users, this becomes a simple task of dragging and dropping those custom formula fields, like any other report field, into a report, rather than every user having to learn to write their formulae. Whether you need to calculate revenue growth percentages, average deal size, profit per sale, or any other financial metric, these tools empower you to derive valuable insights without exporting data to external spreadsheets.

Step 4: Create Custom Dashboards

The fun part is visualizing your data! Salesforce provides real-time information on your business performance along with charting options to bring your financial forecasts to life. You can experiment with different layouts, colors, and filters to create dashboards that are both informative and visually appealing.

This way, you create dynamic dashboards that provide a comprehensive view of your financial performance. View key performance indicators (KPIs), such as Sales Order Processing (SOP), Days Outstanding Sales (DSO), Total Net Profit/Loss, Sales Tax Control, Purchase Tax Control, Revenue Growth Rate, and Lead to Cash Cycle in a visually appealing way. See the big picture in real-time; you can drill into the individual chart components to sort even further and drill into the underlined reports to find detailed transactional information.

We suggest tracking the following KPIs:

• Sales Order Processing (SOP): Helps you track the sales transaction process, ensuring timely processing of orders directly from customer presentation and revenue generation.
• Days Sales Outstanding (DSO): Important because of how quickly customers can pay their invoices. Demonstrates cash allocation and credit management.
• Net Profit/Loss: Provides a total view of the company’s profitability, providing an understanding of the overall financial performance. It also helps collect parts.
• Sales Tax Control: Ensures compliance with tax legislation. Provides accurate and timely tax reporting, helping to avoid regulatory filings and financial penalties.
• Purchase Tax Control: Helps prevent tax-related errors and ensures accurate financial reporting.
• Revenue Growth Rate: Shows the performance of the business in increasing its sales.
• Lead to Cash Cycle: Measures the time it takes for a lead to convert to a room at a showing.
• Procurement to Payment (or Purchase to Payment): Helps optimize vendor relationships, manage costs, and ensure timely availability of goods and services.

Step 5: Share and Collaborate

Share your reports and dashboards with key stakeholders across departments to improve collaboration. Salesforce makes it easy to control access and permissions, ensuring the right people can see the right information.

You can take advantage of collaboration features such as Salesforce Chatter. While this fosters a culture of collaboration, it also ensures flawless harmony in decision-making processes. You can track the entire lifecycle of opportunities, from leads and lead-to-cash (L2C) processes, in one unified system. This means that every financial element, from initial leads to closing transactions, is seamlessly integrated. Salesforce becomes the center of all financial growth by providing finance teams with a holistic view and empowering them to deliver progressive solutions at every stage.

Step 6: Continuous Improvement

As your needs evolve, you can tweak your financial reports and dashboards easily in Salesforce. Experiment with new data sources, refine your visualizations, and keep an eye on new features. The journey to financial reporting is one of continuous learning and optimization. Leverage Salesforce’s adaptability to refine your financial insights and reporting capabilities continually. Whether it’s exploring innovative data sources, honing visualizations for greater clarity, or staying abreast of cutting-edge features, embrace the flexibility that Salesforce provides.

The platform empowers finance teams to not only meet current reporting needs but also to proactively adapt to the ever-changing landscape of financial management when unified with a comprehensive finance solution.

Step 7: Monitor and Iterate

The financial landscape is dynamic, and your reporting requirements may evolve. In Salesforce, you can regularly monitor the effectiveness of your reports and dashboards, seeking feedback from users and iterating as needed. Salesforce’s flexibility allows you to adapt to changing business needs seamlessly. This process ensures that your financial reporting remains tuned to the specific needs of your finance department.

Salesforce’s flexibility acts as a strategic asset, allowing you to seamlessly adapt to the changing business landscape while incorporating specialized finance metrics. This agility ensures that your financial reporting tools align precisely with the unique requirements and complexities faced by finance teams in navigating the dynamic financial environment.

Step 8: The Power of Automation

By automating your repetitive processes, teams can save time and increase the reliability and consistency of their financial reporting. To increase the impact of your financial insights, automation streamlines routine tasks for finance teams, reduces the risk of errors, and ensures data accuracy. This increases the speed and accuracy of financial reporting while also driving finance teams towards more strategic initiatives and financial analysis.

Bonus Tips

Master the art of filters

Filters allow you to focus on specific segments of data and gain deeper insights. Filters serve as a gateway, allowing you to hone in on specific segments and extract deeper insights from the intricate web of financial information. By strategically applying filters, you can dissect data, isolating variables such as periods, product lines, or customer segments. This precision not only facilitates nuanced analyses but also empowers you to create customized views tailored to the unique needs of various stakeholders.

Explore the AppExchange

AppExchange serves as a marketplace where accounting software can be found, offering a diverse array of tools to bring functionality to your Salesforce platform. In this digital marketplace, you can discover finance apps tailored to streamline and elevate financial reporting processes.

These apps bring added functionality and power to your fingertips, providing specialized tools that cater to the unique demands of financial analysis, reporting, and dashboard creation. Whether it’s advanced analytics, automated financial forecasting, or specialized reporting features, the AppExchange is a treasure where innovative solutions await exploration. The AppExchange is a brilliant resource for staying at the forefront of technology and maximizing the potential of your financial reporting efforts.

Summary

Mastering financial reports and dashboards in Salesforce is a journey that begins with a solid understanding of your organization’s financial data model. Build insightful reports and customize dashboards to transform raw data into actionable insights. Salesforce empowers your team to make informed decisions based on real-time financial data with the ability to schedule and share reports.

Stay agile, monitor performance, and iterate to ensure that your financial reporting remains a powerful asset in steering your business toward success.