Cross Object Dashboard Filter by Owner

Dashboards are great and widely used feature in any Salesforce org. They visualize the data that are users are capturing and allow us to perform analysis, comparisons, measure performance and predict outcomes. A key design component when building dashboards is to build them not only for present day, but also for the future. When doing so be sure to think about the level of effort for maintaining these. Using filters within our Dashboards allows us to slice and dice the data in many ways without have to look in multiple places or across several different dashboards. One of the most common filters added is for the record owner. Being able to land on a sales Dashboard and being able to see the pipeline for the entire team, but then being able to filter to an individual sales rep gives us tremendous flexibility.

One area that this type of filter falls short is when you have multiple objects on one dashboard. A simple example is having an Opportunity stage funnel chart next to a Lead Status funnel chart on a pipeline Dashboard. This gives you a quick glimpse of what the health and status of your projected sales reps performance could be. The limitation with this is caused by the Lead object because the owner field is polymorphic. This means that objects such as Leads, Tasks and Cases, can be owned by Users OR by Queues. The system doesn’t see these as equivalents to something like Opportunity Owner, which is a lookup to Users only. We can see in the image below that Lead Owner is not an option to select for this reason.

An initial workaround for this came to mind of adding a formula that took in the text value of the owner’s name, but this was not available to be used as a filter. What will work is adding a new lookup field on the objects in the dashboard, which would then need to be populated upon record creation and ownership change via automation. A custom field and a before save record-triggered Flow can be used to accomplish this. For this example we are excluding Leads owned by a queue and only focusing on those owned by reps.

Let’s take a look at how this works.