Display Only My Role’s Records on a Report

Making a Salesforce Opportunity leaderboard is possible, but I’ve seen some cases where the standard filters don’t work well enough. It is easy enough to make a report that shows “My Accounts,” “My Opportunities,” and others. Let’s look at some of the standard options:

According to the documentation,

• My Opportunities – Searches ONLY the opportunities you OWN.
• My Team-selling opportunities – Searches ONLY the opportunities where you are on the SALES TEAM.
• My Team-selling and my own Opportunities – Searches BOTH the opportunities you OWN and the opportunities where you are on the SALES TEAM.
• My Team’s Opportunities – Searches ONLY the opportunities OWNED by you and the users who report to you in the role hierarchy.
• My Team’s Team-selling and their Opportunities – Searches the opportunities OWNED by you and the users that report to you in the role hierarchy, as well as opportunities where you or the users who report to you in the role hierarchy are on the SALES TEAM.
• All Opportunities – Searches ALL visible opportunities.

That’s great, but it doesn’t quite help for a common situation. What if I have each sales team in a different role in the hierarchy and I want people to see only the Opportunities owned by users with that same role? This often happens in companies that have a hierarchy that is geography-based and segment-based. So imagine something like this.

• VP Sales
  • Director, Americas
    • SMB Team, Americas
    • Mid-Market Team, Americas
    • Enterprise Team, Americas
  • Director, EMEA
    • SMB Team, EMEA
    • Mid-Market Team, EMEA
    • Enterprise Team, EMEA

Summer 2013 has a new feature, a Checkbox Formula field. Just input an expression or an equation. If the expression yields 1 or true, or if the equation is, well, equal, then a checkbox appears on the page layout. In a data export, the field will say TRUE or FALSE. Simple! Let’s use this formula:

Owner.UserRoleId = $UserRole.Id

That’s it. Put that formula on the Opportunity object, and you’re done. Make a report with a filter to show only records where that field = TRUE, and the dynamic dashboard chart from that will show all Opportunities owned by other users in the running user’s role. Yes, that’s the catch: You must use a dynamic dashboard.

I’m sure you can imagine other uses for this such as a checkbox formula field on Contact: OwnerId = Account.OwnerId. And there are many more.

Checkbox formula fields – a little bit of awesome in Summer 13. What other uses can you think of?