Salesforce reporting 101: Why it's best in class for leisure & entertainment

One source of truth

Thanks to the power of the Salesforce platform, all of our data links back to the single and most important source of truth: the customer. You’re able to access all key metrics from one single place thanks to how we organise the data in the Salesforce’s platform and the endless integrations available on the AppExchange.

This means you’re always seeing the full picture, and can leverage that to increase your revenue due to things like automated marketing funnels based on user behaviour. With everything housed on this one platform, you have a complete 360 view of your customer, giving you complete unparalleled insight into them.

As mentioned, thanks to the AppExchange, for most of the tools that you do need to use outside of the built-in Salesforce ones, you can easily download the relevant app from the AppExchange to access data from your Salesforce platform. For example, let’s look at Mailchimp. Rather than having to do exports or trying to connect multi systems, simply download the Mailchimp app in Salesforce from the AppExchange and it has access to the data immediately.

The advantage of this is as opposed to alternative setups without this capability, is you cannot access all data within one platform, stopping you from ever truly automating or leveraging your data as it’s coming from a range of sources. Having one platform like Salesforce in place, also provides you back valuable admin time as you only need to rely on one tool versus a handful of different solutions.

One unified view

Thanks to Salesforce’s ability to build out Dashboards you can group all of your most essential reports in one easy to absorb view – like the screenshot below. 

This means you don’t need to spend time jumping from report to report, all of your information is housed in one spot. You can also set up emails to send you these updates on a time basis determined by you, meaning your information is delivered straight to your inbox, in real time with the most up to date data. 

You’re in control

With BookNow & Salesforce, you’re able to choose which members of your administration team can access what, so you can restrict views/edit ability to certain reports if you need to keep those private. If you do have wider access to reports, you are able to use Salesforce’s history tracking tool to see who has made any changes to the report and so forth, giving your business an increased element of accountability. 

With Salesforce having trust as their number one priority, you can also be assured that your data is housed within one of the most secure systems in the world, giving you both control and peace of mind. 

Grow with your business

When used to its full potential, Salesforce reporting is able to answer the important questions about your business – is my revisitation rate increasing? Am I charging the right price? 

Use this tool to hold your business to account, and see where there may be room for improvement and additional revenue opportunities across your business. Also it’s important to remember that businesses change, and likewise goals may change too – with a reporting tool like Salesforce, you’re able to adjust what you’re reporting on with ease, meaning the platform grows as you grow, which differs from competitors reporting tools which can lock you into specific reports throughout your lifecycle of using their product.

Complexity VS Salesforce Simplicity 

When it comes to the ease-of-use of Salesforce reporting, nothing exemplifies this better than looking at alternative providers’ use of SQL, as previously mentioned. 

SQL can be used to find data in a database and is used by alternative solutions on the marketplace that lack the user friend reporting capabilities of Salesforce when they want to find something outside of a canned report. 

Here is an example of how to use the SQL statement to find data for customers in a Axe Throwing Site who have spent over £100:

SELECT customers.first_name, orders.total_amount
FROM customers
WHERE site = ‘Axe Throwing Site’
JOIN orders ON customers.id = orders.customer_id
GROUP BY customers.first_name
HAVING SUM(orders.total_amount) > 100;

Confused? 

Now imagine how hard this gets to analyse and visualise data! 

BookNow uses Salesforce’s powerful, yet easy to use, reporting tools to make finding data a simple click exercise which you can instantly add to a dashboard or create a graph. 

You can easily add fields, filters and grouping to visualise the data. Let’s look at how we would do the same as above in Salesforce.