Spreadsheets may be a thing of the past, but with its flexibility, power, ease of use, and availability, Excel will never die. You’ve been building Excel spreadsheets for years that help you calculate everything from interest to commissions to bonus payments and more, and when you implement Salesforce, you have to take into account rebuilding those calculations – some of which are pretty complex – in your new CRM. It would be so much easier if Salesforce could work with Excel so that you didn’t have to start from square one. CalcFusion is here to do just that!
Use Excel to create new functions and modules within Salesforce. CalcFusion brings flexibility by utilizing Excel computations and functions as a backend system to your Salesforce account.
Check out CalcFusion and start leveraging your Excel spreadsheets in Salesforce today!
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
The goal of this blog is to help you get the best return on investment from your Salesforce instance. Typically, that means introducing newcomers to tools they may not be aware of while giving more experienced readers little tricks to help hone what they already know. This week is no different, though some of you in the experienced camp might find yourselves in a different position this week. There’s a sneaky field a lot of people don’t realize is hiding in the corner of your Salesforce org that can play a huge role in your day to day operations.
Even though you can’t add it to your page layouts, the Last Activity field is available for Accounts, Contacts, and Leads in Reports, List Views, Formula Fields, and Apex. Last Activity tells you the last time an Activity was logged for a record – whether it was an in person meeting, call, or email. If you’re trying to set up a call list for your team, Last Activity can be used to help isolate clients or prospects who haven’t heard from you in a while or report on who got your attention recently. Creating a simple formula field called Days Since Last Touch with the value of:
sweetens the pot with an easy way to see who needs to hear from you. For more details on how Last Activity is calculated, check out the details here, and enjoy leveraging this oft forgotten, powerful tool!
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
You may think that the real Salesforce superheroes are the developers. And you’re right. But I have some exciting news for you! If you’ve ever built a formula field or workflow rule in Salesforce, you’re a developer! As a superhero, you’re going to need to start developing your super powers, and this week, I’d like to share a trick that will give you the ability to travel through time and read minds all at once!
Looking at a complicated formula you (or maybe someone else) wrote oh so many moons ago can take ages to unwind. It would be easier to just read the other developer’s mind or have a conversation with the past you. Adding comments to your formulas and training your team to do the same turns you into Professor Xavier and The Doctor rolled into one super awesome Salesforce superhero. Add a comment anywhere in your formula by writing /* before a note in plain English (or your language of choice) explaining your purpose, then end it with */. Salesforce will ignore the commented parts, and now when you ask yourself “why did I write that IF statement like that?” you’ll get an answer from somewhere in the time vortex. You can’t change the past, but you’ll certainly be giving your team a brighter future!
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
For more than a year, we’ve been sharing a new, exciting, powerful, or just really cool app with you every week. Some are about improving productivity, others focus on giving your team an awesome user experience, and some of them are just for fun. But this week is a little different. This week’s app is our baby, and we’re excited to announce that we have just launched a new app, the XIRR Calculator by the team at CloudMyBiz!
If you’re a lender or broker, you know how hard it can be to find your return on investment. That’s why we created the XIRR Calculator. Enter the funding and repayment amounts, terms, fees, and commissions, click calculate, and you have your answer. Easy.
Ditch the spreadsheets and calculate your XIRR straight from salesforce using our awesome, new, free app, the XIRR Calculator! And don’t forget to leave a rating and a few comments.
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
Reports are an awesome tool in Salesforce. In a matter of minutes, you can filter, group, and summarize your data in countless ways to give you exactly the information you need and reorganize it in seconds. But let’s say your team constantly needs to see a very specific Report based on information from a record. Maybe you want to quickly see how much revenue is being generated by accounts in the same State as the one you’re looking at, or what Cases have been opened by people from the same company while you’re working on a support ticket. Your team could all constantly update the same Report or you could create an individual Report for each circumstance, but that means slowing down the process or filtering through thousands of Reports. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just have one Report that was smart enough to always give you the information you need right now? Well, you can with dynamic Reports in Salesforce!
This is the quick and dirty guide to creating dynamic Reports for those of you with too little time in your day. You’ll probably want to grab a cup of coffee like you did when you read our URL hacking guide, but know that this is only skimming the surface of what you can do with dynamic Reports.
So, start off by creating a Report – we’ll call our example Opportunities Won by State. Add all the fields your team needs. Next, add the filters you want to apply starting with the ones that need to be dynamic. To make your life easier, throw in values for those filters rather than leaving them blank so that you can see what the Report will look like when it works. In my Report, the first filter in my Opportunity Report (which should be dynamic) is Billing State equals CA, and the second (which should always stay the same) is Stage equals Closed Won. Save your Report to a public folder, and make a note somewhere of the Report ID (the 15 character code after salesforce.com/ in the URL – see example below) and the exact order of those filters.
https://na8.salesforce.com/00O60000003ioH4
Now, go to the object where you want to access the Report from (I want to see mine from Accounts) and create a new Custom Link. Be sure the Content Source is set to URL, then in the big box, enter a /, the Report ID, and a ?. It should look like this:
/00O60000003ioH4?
Almost done! Now comes the fun part. We need to tell the Report what parameter values (pv’s) to use. When I created my Report, my first filter, or parameter, was Billing State. So I’ll start by typing pv0= (note the 0 – Salesforce starts the count from 0 rather than 1 here). Next, I’ll select the merge field I’m looking for using the formula editor to insert, or if I know the API name, I can just enter it in the format of {!sObject.Field}. It should look like this:
/00O60000003ioH4?pv0={!Account.PostalCode}
Let’s say I had one more filter that I wanted to be dynamic. I don’t just want to see Opportunities from this State, but ones referred by the same Account. Just add an & (no spaces) in between each value and increment the number after pv:
Once you’ve finished setting up the link, save it, then add it to your page layout. Go to a record and click on the link to test. Sometimes you’ll find that you may have mixed up your pv’s or that the filters are too restrictive or too open-ended and you’re not getting the data you need. If that happens, open up your Report in one tab, your Custom Link in another, and a sample record in a third. This will allow you to quickly make changes to your Link and Report and see the results. Once you’re totally satisfied, let your team know about the awesome new feature that’s already waiting on their page layouts and treat yourself to another well-deserved cup of coffee!
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
