Salesforce Cross Filters permit the user to make a report that recognizes records regardless of a connected record, where you have no requirement for the connected item’s information (so you don’t need those related object’s fields displayed in the report).
What is a Salesforce Cross Filter?
There are records and related records in Salesforce and other social information bases.
It regularly has numerous articles related to one. Some models are:
- Accounts related to Contacts
- Tasks related to Contacts
- Opportunities related to Accounts
- Leads related to Campaigns
There are two different types of records. In the example below, one is an Opportunity, and one is an Account, they are separate records, but related:
The Opportunity realizes which Account it is connected with utilizing the Account Name field on the Opportunity. This is what it resembles “in the engine” in the Salesforce Schema:
A Cross Filter goes across/down that relationship. In the image above, a Cross Filter will go down from Account to Opportunity. When you add a cross filter to a report, you are looking at the data in a Related List and filtering based on those child records.
How to Create a Cross Filter in Salesforce
In this template, we will look for Opportunities without Products. It will start with a report on Opportunities.
We will add a filter based on Products related to the Opportunity.
The cross filter will not allow you to show any fields from the young object, so assuming that is what you need (i.e., to show field information from Products), you want to use an Opportunities with Products type of report.
- Create an Opportunity Report
Report Types allow Cross Filters, but occasionally, the options are grayed out.
Typically, this means that your organization has the option disabled (if you are using Group or Professional Edition). Make sure you can see the “Add Cross Filter” action by going to the Filters pane and clicking on the dropdown next to Filters.
2. Now you will see a new filter section appear.
The edit modal will prompt you to define the Parent and Child.
As an example, Opportunities have Opportunity Line Items, Contact Roles, Quotes, etc. As another example, if the report was “Account With Cases“, then you would have the option to define the parent as Account OR Case.
This is where the power comes in: you can select “With” or “Without“. This means that you can find any individual missing child records using the “Without” option.
This is exactly what we want to do in our example, so let’s continue to run our Opportunities Without Products report.
3. Select the relationship:
Since we have the relationship set, we have the most basic filter: Show Opportunities that have no related Products.
The Update report of our Opportunities will currently just presentation Opportunities without Products.
Add Sub-filters to Salesforce Reports
We have a list of Opportunities without Products, but you’ve just received further requirements.
We believe our report should show just Opportunities without Products, yet with “Demo” Activities. Having finished a demo, our sales reps are to be in a situation to add Products.
- Add another Cross Filter for “Activities”:
2. Add an “Activity Filter” to retrieve Opportunities that have a related Activity with the Subject containing “Demo”.
