Getting Reports and Dashboards in front of Salesforce users remains one of the key aspects of ensuring adoption. By leveraging the existing functionality as well as new enhancements from the latest releases, your users will be able to easily find the metrics they need and better understand them.
In this post, we will explore how Reports and Dashboards can become rapidly accessible from Lightning pages in no time.
Build the Reports and Dashboards
The underlying reports and even custom Report types of Dashboards are getting more user-friendly with each release. The latest Spring ‘25 Salesforce release allows you to individually refresh Dashboard widgets, automatically sort the charts based on the sorting in the Report, and offers a new generally available Report Types experience in Setup.
The main process of creating a Report remains unchanged, however – you will still need to know the data and fields you are looking to capture in your Report so that you can select the suitable Report type, as well as choose the filters, filter logic, and add up to three groupings.
In this example, we will use a simple opportunity Report grouped by opportunity stage, as well as an accounts Report grouped by the account type. If you would just like to embed the Report chart on a page, remember to add a grouping and the chart as needed.
Once the Reports are ready, it’s only a matter of adding them to the dashboard, deciding on the components and charts used, as well as the filters that will become available for users to select from at the top of the page if needed – just like any other one.
We will add a few components using the two Reports we build, but of course, you can add up to 25 widgets, be it charts, tables, text, or images. Additionally, don’t forget to make sure your Dashboard fits the page nicely as well.
Edit the Lightning Page of Choice
The next step is to choose the page on which either the dashboard or Report chart will be displayed. It may make sense for your use case to display an opportunity chart on an Account – which I will cover later – or on another record page. But in this example, I will add the dashboard on the Homepage.
Customizing the Homepage itself in general is a great idea way to enhance the experience right from when the user logs into Salesforce. Accounts and Opportunities are something that Sales Managers are certainly interested in, so let’s customize the Homepage from the Sales App.
When different groups of users need to see different dashboards or Reports while the rest of the page remains the same, you can also leverage user filters to filter the component visibility on the page. It all depends on the current setup in your org as well as the requirement at hand.
Of course, when creating or editing an actual Homepage in your Sandbox – regardless of the team it’s dedicated to – remember to look at other available components as well. For example, you could leverage a tabs component, and easily add multiple different dashboards, each under its own tab.
Alternatively, you could also only add one of the Reports (or both!) as Report charts in different places on the page. The same steps apply, but you will instead choose the Report chart component. Also, you can leverage a rich text component for additional instructions and URLs.
If you are thinking about customizing the Sales Homepage as I did in the example above, make sure to first check out the new Seller Home which became available last year. If you haven’t already tried it out and used a custom one until now, make sure to take a look over it by enabling it from Setup.
Embed Report Chart on Record Page
Another place where Report charts can be of great help, and also enhance the experience for the users, is a record page. Instead of Account Owners having to go through the related list of Opportunities just to get an overview, this can be a Report Chart embedded on the Account Record Page. Let’s use the same Opportunities by Stage report from the example above.
A useful feature of Record Pages for Report Charts is the ability to filter by the record’s ID. This allows you to dynamically show only those records related to the Record Page, rather than relying solely on Report filters. While the “filter by” option may not be applicable in all scenarios, it is a valuable tool to have available.
Summary
Analytics play a critical role in day-to-day work, and Reports and Dashboards in Salesforce will surely continue being used by end users and Salesforce Admins alike.
Ensuring these can be easily found after they are built right within the platform, regardless of the solution you choose, will not only increase adoption but also remove the need for extra steps, such as bookmarking within the browser.
How do you share Reports and Dashboards with your end users to ensure they are both useful and readily available in their flow of work? Let us know in the comments below!
