Two Additional Ways to Filter Your Reports

If you have created a Salesforce report you have probably used a report filter. Whether this has been by time period, such as created date, or by sales rep or opportunity stage, these filters determine which records do or do not show up in your report results. Filtering reports allows you to focus in on the specific records that matter for what you are interested in. In addition to traditional report filters, there are two other filter features available in reports that can very useful. Let’s take a deeper look at each of these. Below is a brief overview of each feature as well as use cases and a video demo.

1. Cross Filters

• Allow you to filter reports based on objects instead of just fields
• With or without statement, one object related to another

Use Cases – Cross Filters

• The Marketing Manager wants to identify all Accounts without Contacts to add Contacts into their Marketing funnel.

The first time that someone asked me for this report I had no idea that cross filters existed. The only way that I was able to produce the results was to export the entire database and create Excel formulas to return a 1 or 0 to a column if there were contacts. It took forever. Some time later I learned about cross filters and was able to reproduce this in mere seconds.

• The Director of Sales is interested in reviewing all Accounts with Opportunities in order to identify industry trends focusing only on new customers.

Once we understand the premise of cross filters we can then extend their capabilities. Here we will use an accounts report type with a cross filter on opportunities. Within our cross filter we are then able to further filter by an opportunity field, even though there are no opportunity fields in the report type.

• As a Sales Rep, all Contacts part of Opportunities should have Activities associated with them. You want to make sure you’ve done this and create a report of all Contacts without Activities to begin outreach.

Cross filter can also be layered. In this example we add two cross filters to a report based on contacts using both a with and a without filter to return our results.

Video Demo – Cross Filters

2. Field-to-Field Filters

• Compare values of two fields
• Lightning experience only
• Must be enabled in report and dashboard settings

Use Case – Field-to-Field Filters

• The Marketing Team Lead wants to evaluate all Campaigns that have an actual cost more than the budget cost to help with budget planning for next year.

Being able to filter based on field values is a great new feature. It allows us to compare values for two fields and then set our filter based on equals, great than and all of our other standard operators. No longer will we need to create formulas or do calculations or eye ball results to focus on these specific records.

Video Demo – Field-to-Field Filters

Related Trailhead Modules

Add Cross Filters