Don’t waste your time sending and formatting reports

Sales Operations is in charge of reporting because they own data, automation, and processes. The whole company needs reporting. If you don’t automate reporting as soon as possible, you’ll be overwhelmed. In this post, I’ll share few tricks I’ve found down the road, so you don’t get stuck in Groundhog Day. You’ll never create, format or send more than once the same report or dashboard. Instead, spend time analyzing your reports.

When someone comes to me and asks for a report, I ask myself the following questions:

• Can I use Salesforce native functionalities?
• How often does he need the information?
• Does he need the ability to drill down?
• Can it benefit other team members?

Most of the time, you’ll be able to automate it with Salesforce. If he needs the information on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, you can use schedule reports and dashboards. When he needs the report on specific conditions, help them subscribe to get report notifications. If they need it whenever they like, place it in a report folder and share with other team members if it’s relevant.

In some cases, Salesforce reports and dashboards won’t suit your needs. Excel will be the best option in this case as it’s much more flexible. Microsoft recently released Microsoft Power Query for Excel, a powerful Excel add-in that simplifies data imports. You guessed, you can import Salesforce data into Excel, which will allow you to build and share those complex reports and dashboards. It’s best if you know how to perform SQL queries, but you can use the Power Query UI to write it for you. You can get aggregated results if your users don’t need to drill down, or you can query entire tables based on Salesforce objects if they need to drill down. So you’ve created your report and formatted it within Excel. Follow the steps here below if you need to schedule it.

Send reports thought Excel

The following VBA code tells your Excel file to send a named ranged by email whenever it’s opened, and then it closes itself automatically. Simply put, it’s going to throw the report on your behalf you whenever you open it.

The Windows Task Scheduler

The Windows Task Scheduler will do the rest for you. It’s going to open the Excel file on a schedule you define. Fill in the following information within the Windows Task Scheduler Actions tab:

• Action: Start a program
• Program/script: YOUR EXCEL EXE FILE PATH “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office16\EXCEL.EXE”
• Add Argument (optional): YOUR EXCEL FILE PATH “C:\User\NathanPrats\Desktop\YourReport.xlsm”

On the Triggers tab, define whenever you want to send the report.