Account Hierarchy Reporting

Recently, a customer of mine had a request to be to report on their Account Hierarchies. The out of the box UI display does a good job of visually presenting how Accounts are related to one another. However, this requires you to click into an Account record in order to see this. This use case that my client had was that they wanted to be able to see the hierarchy in a Report to help identify whether an Account was part of a hierarchy when reassigning Account ownership.

As I was solutioning what the best approach would be, I considered adding formula fields on the Account, or maybe lookups with automation. Both of these options give upward hierarchy visibility, but don’t offer any downward visibility. I also did not want to overcomplicate the build and since they only need to see the hierarchy in a Report or exported spreadsheet I determined that a Custom report Type would be the simplest and best solution.

There are only two steps as part of our build:

1. Create a Custom Report Type

This will be a single Object report type. We will add custom sections, use Fields via related lookups, rename how they display. and set default columns.

2. Create a Report

We will use the Custom Report Type from step 1 and add the appropriate columns to display the hierarchy information. Here’s what the finished Report will show us.

Let’s take a look at both steps to produce our Account hierarchy Report.