If you want to become a more effective Salesforce Admin, then this dashboard is for you. It will show you what is happening your org to keep you up to date, and it is easily created.
The last thing you want is to be the admin that has to say: “surprise, we need 10 more licenses, and we’re over our API Limit!” – or even worse, have to explain why you didn’t know that 50% of your users were not even logging in to Salesforce! That makes you look really ineffective in your role. But if you stay on top of this information, it can save your organisation a lot of money and keep your reputation in tact. This post will take you through components for Licenses, Salesforce Usage, Task Tracking.
Questions Every Admins Should Answer
Salesforce can be a pretty costly investment, so it’s not surprising that companies want to minimize costs and reduce waste as much as possible. I got the idea for this dashboard when I started getting a lot of questions from finance teams, like: “do we have enough licenses?”, “is there anything in Salesforce that might cost us more money?”, “are we getting the best ROI possible out of Salesforce?”…
I wanted to find a solution so I could answer those kind of questions quickly and accurately, and also do my best to save our company money. This dashboard is the reason I could answer those questions.
As I’ve gone in to consulting and worked in different orgs, I’ve found this dashboard is still useful to keep up with many different orgs with different limits and requirements – especially with the clients whose orgs I don’t monitor every single day.
Admin Daily Dashboard Components – What’s Included?
Here are a few components that I include in every org’s Admin Daily Dashboard:
- Licenses Used / Licenses Purchased
- Active Users / # of Employees
- API Calls
- Community Logins
- Community Login Trending
These components quickly and easily allow me to see if I’m running close to the limit on how many licenses a client needs, and if they need to buy more.
Looking Ahead: Important Information Not in Salesforce
There’s one piece of information that’s not in Salesforce though: the companies hiring plan. So make friends with HR or Recruiting, and find out what the upcoming headcount is, so you can plan your Salesforce licenses accordingly. If your client pays for Community Licenses too you’ll want to add those components here, and make sure you don’t go over your limit!
A Note About API Calls Reports
I get a lot of people asking me how to do this, and the truth is, it’s a pain, but super valuable.
You’ll need to be in Classic for this one, and go to your report folders, then find the “Administrative Reports” folder. You’ll see the “API Usage Last 7 Days” report – that’s the one you want.
Make your report and add it to a plain dashboard in Classic. Do whatever editing you want to do, because once you convert that dashboard to Lightning, you won’t be able to edit that component at all.
Salesforce Usage Components
After those ‘must add’ components, things get a little more optional depending on what org I’m in or what the client needs. However, I nearly always report on Salesforce Usage.
This includes:
- Who has not logged in during the last 30 days?
- Who are the newest users in the last 30 days?
- How many users are in each profile? (You may decide to include Roles in this section too.)
I find this section to be really useful when I’m coming into an existing org (one that I did not set up from scratch). In these orgs, I often don’t know who is or isn’t supposed to be logging in, or if the users are in the right profile or not. Being able to view these components helps me improve the security of an org, and also helps save money if there are licenses that can be reassigned to someone who needs them.
Task Tracking Components
The next section I include is often Task Tracking, either for myself or for a whole admin team.
If you haven’t done so yet, check out my earlier post about tracking all Salesforce changes on a custom object. This dashboard is a great way to show your value as an administrator to your client or your employer.
There’s a lot more you can add to this dashboard, but remember that you can’t add more than 20 components to a single dashboard. On this example, there are already 13 components – and I haven’t even started talking about data quality!
The most important thing to remember is that this dashboard is for you, the administrator. Add whatever you need! If you get a lot of questions from your team on specific topics, those are the types of things you want to add to your dashboard.
Admin Specific Lightning App
Once your dashboard is up and running, my favorite thing to do is to create a Lightning App for the admin, and add this dashboard as a component. That way it shows up right when I log in to an org.
I also always make the dashboard a favorite so I can refer back to it whenever I need to. Since this is an Admin Daily Dashboard, you can also schedule it to email you every day so it’s ready when you first check your email in the morning.
Summary
Now that I am a consultant and I work in many different orgs every day, this dashboard has become invaluable. It gives me the ability to keep an eye on all of my clients without logging in to each org every day, and also allows me to answer important financial questions quickly and accurately, without needing to reply, “Let me get back to you on that one…”
I hope that you try out this dashboard and find it useful as well, and I’d love to hear how it works out for you! If you have suggestions of other types of reports to add to the Admin Daily Dashboard please let me know, I’d love to hear them!