As a Salesforce Admin, I find myself repeating many of the same tasks when I move to a new company and am in a new (new to me, anyway) Salesforce org. One of the projects that seems to crop up everywhere I go is report and dashboard cleanup. (I know, right? It’s so tempting to take the “Create Report Folders” and “Manage Reports in Public Folders” permissions away from everyone. Someday… but I digress.)

The first time I began a major cleanup of reports, dashboards, and their folders, I thought with absolute confidence, “This should be easy, I can just run a report on reports!”

Followed immediately by, “Uh, wait… is this all of the info I can get?” Right. In the standard “Reports” report type, that is all the info you can get.

Sound familiar? Allow me to introduce you to two of my favorite custom report types. These report types answer the two questions that are most important to me every time I start a report and/or dashboard cleanup.

Why: If you are thinking about turning on enhanced folder sharing, one of the most important things to know when determining levels of access is who created each folder.

How: Go to Setup | Create | Report Types and click “New Custom Report Type.” Select “Reports” as the Primary Object. Give your report type a name and description, and select Deployed so that you can start using it right away.

Then click Next, and you will see this nifty little Venn diagram. We do not need to add additional objects to this report, so this is fine the way it is.

Go ahead and click Save. After it is saved, scroll down to the “Fields Available for Reports” section and click “Edit Layout.” On the right-hand side of the edit page, in a box containing the available fields, click “Add fields related via lookup.”

A box will pop up with some lookup options. Click on “Folder” and there they are! All of the folder fields that we didn’t have before!

Select all of them, and click OK. Then click Save. (Optionally, you can create a new section before you save, if you want to keep the folder data separate from the report data.)

Why: Ever try to delete a report that you know is out of date or not useful anymore, and you get that error message – “Report cannot be deleted – one or more dashboards depend on this report” – but it doesn’t tell you which dashboard? Yeah, that.

How: Go to Setup | Create | Report Types and click “New Custom Report Type.” This time, select “Dashboards” as the Primary Object.

Click Next, and this time, you will want to add a related object – Dashboard Components.

Save, then scroll down and click “Edit Layout.” This time, select “Dashboard Components Fields” from the dropdown menu in the fields box, and then click “Add fields related via lookup.”

In the box that pops up, click on “Custom Report,” select the report fields that you want to include, and click OK. Then Save.

And just like that… two new report types that will quickly tell you all you need to know about your reports and dashboards. So what are you waiting for? Happy cleaning!