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voutchervoutcher 

Historic point in time reporting

Does anyone have any solutions as to how to run historic point in time reports.

 

For instance I want to be able to run some basic (and some not so basic) tabular reports on custom objects that would give me the data as of an arbitrary date i.e.. 1/1/2007. Currently the data would be as of today.

 

Obviously this would require field tracking to be enabled but I can't find a good solution for reporting on it. My only option it seems is to look at extracting the data on a regular schedule to a custom BI solution.

 

Note that snapshot reporting wouldn't work in this instance since I might not know the exact fields I want to report on ahead of time but would want to graph the historic trend.

 

Thanks for any thoughts.

werewolfwerewolf

If you've been keeping history on the fields then you can do a report on the history object associated with your object.  If not, then there's no way to do this because you haven't been preserving the data over time.  Still, even if you have been keeping history, it's not that easy to extract trending data from that raw history stream -- that's what BI products are good at.

 

Although if you're doing something like reporting on closed opportunities, where the date of closure is stamped right on the object, a matrix report is usually sufficient.

voutchervoutcher

When you say its not that easy, would it be possible in salesforce?

 

Do you have a good recommendation for a BI product that would integrate with salesforce and do something like what I am trying to do?

 

As a work around I was investigating keeping a history by saving a new history object based on a trigger and saving the fields I need to that history object with all the necessary dates. It seemed like it would work (but eats disk space) until I started looking at the salesforce reporting functionality which seems limiting. I just want to be sure I'm giving it a fair go before I look too hard at external products.

 

Thanks

werewolfwerewolf
I do not have a good recommendation for you, sorry -- you might ask that question on the Best Practices board to see what those folks are using.