Customized Dashboards for the User in Financial Force
In this quick blog post, I’ll be sharing a valuable tip given to me by a fellow consultant when I first started learning FinancialForce. Pass it along!!
Dashboards are the Key
As a consultant, I believe giving my users information with as few as clicks as possible is a key to system success. While stand-alone reports clearly will always have their place, a stakeholder is ideally served up their metrics on a silver platter without having to identify, locate, and run a specific report. Likewise, being able to display multiple sources of information on a single page allows the user to compare and combine data to draw high value conclusions.
One example of this - perhaps a manager might be interesting in seeing all of their resources whose utilization is less than 60% in the upcoming month. This is called Management by Exception and is a common tactic employed in Dashboarding. The goal is to highlight specific information needing action.
The Easy Part
The easy part of this exercise is the report itself. For something like this, I’d probably leverage Utilization Details filtered down to Time Period Type of ‘Month’.
Using Lightning, I’d probably put a nifty chart at the top… Note that you’ll want to build a full Lightning Dashboard page for this. That step has been omitted here for brevity.
The Interesting Part.
The tricky part here is that we want the report to only show Resources who report to the Manager, i.e. the person viewing the report. Here’s where things get interesting.
One cool thing that Salesforce lets us do is reference the current user in report formula fields. This variable is known as $User and can be leveraged for all sorts of interesting things.
Meanwhile, we also have a reference to the Resource’s manager using the ‘Reports to’ field on the Resource itself.
Knowing these two items lets us do the following:
Create a custom ‘checkbox’ (boolean) Formula field on the Utilization object called ‘Current User is Manager’.
Set the formula as follows:
IF($User.Email = pse__Resource__r.ReportsTo.Email, TRUE, FALSE)
Then , add the formula to the report criteria.
In the report criteria, you want ‘Current User is Manager’ to be true.
And… done
From here, you can safely add this report to dashboards, and feel good that the viewing user will only see her/his direct reports that otherwise meet the criteria!
Soon, you’ll likely find yourself adding this formula to the usual suspects like Timecards, Resource Requests, and Est vs Actuals!
