Limits on Salesforce Dashboards: a case for CRM Analytics

Dashboards are a vital tool in Salesforce, offering a straightforward way to generate powerful insights from your data. These insights are crucial for making informed decisions and driving sustainable growth. Without data, an organization is blind, and without generating insights from that data, it’s directionless.

Filters play a crucial role in refining what you want to see on your dashboards. Salesforce allows for up to three different filters, which can be used individually or combined with AND logic. While this is often sufficient, what happens when you need more? The current workaround involves duplicating your dashboard and setting different filters on the new one. This method, though effective, is not ideal, especially if you require more than three filters simultaneously.

In my opinion, worse than the filter limit is how a customer-like filter needs to be handled. Imagine you want to filter your cases by their accounts. You can create an Account filter that will use the AccountId lookup field on the case to get the desired result. Two issues arise:

1. Manually setting each possible filter value individually.
2. Being restricted to a limit of 50 values.

I must go through a tedious process of filling in 50 accounts on the filter just so I can select the record that I want. Shouldn’t the platform do that for me automatically when I say that I want to filter accounts? Besides that, I’m limited to 50 records. My account list is way bigger than 50 records so what should I do? These are some cases where the the limitations just seem stark and not up to Salesforce’s standards.

And let’s not start talking about how you can select your own color palette. So many companies need to extract dashboards and send them to customers but are unable to do so because they can’t set up the brand’s colors on the charts. While this might seem minor, it highlights the need for greater flexibility and customization.

All of this is pretty simple when we’re working with dashboards built on CRM Analytics. Generating an Account filter is as simple as selecting the account field during filter creation. All values are correctly retrieved without limits. You can have as many filters as you want. You don’t lose time while building. We’d give everything to have the same experience without the need for an additional license.

While CRM Analytics is a powerful tool, it’s not yet widely known. It's time for us to change that and leverage its capabilities to enhance our dashboarding experience.

Salesforce dashboards are essential for generating insights, but they come with limitations in filters and customization. CRM Analytics addresses these issues, providing advanced features and greater flexibility. Embracing CRM Analytics can take your dashboards to the next level, ensuring your organization makes the most of its data.