Track Changes Over Time with Historical Trend Reporting

Historical trend reporting uses a special custom report type designed to highlight changes between five snapshot dates, such as five business days or five business weeks. You can visually represent the data changes in charts and on dashboards.

For organizations created in Winter ’14 and thereafter, historical trend reporting is activated by default. If your organization is older than that, you must activate historical trend reporting in the Setup menu.

Salesforce retains historical data for the previous three months, plus the current month. (The amount of historical data you can work with in practice depends on your organization’s data design and use patterns.) You can select up to five date snapshots in that span to compare, using up to four historical filters.

Longer durations than days or weeks are not recommended. They may result in reports timing out and not returning. For small organizations with fewer records, month-to-month trend reporting may work, but this is not what historical trend reporting is designed for.

Note Historical trend reports are also called historical tracking reports.

Tip You can also create and customize historical trend reporting reports via the Metadata API and the Reports and Dashboards REST API.

• Track Changes in Your Sales Pipeline
  A historical report can help you monitor your company’s sales pipeline to make sure it contains enough activity to meet current and future sales goals. For example, focus on deals whose value grew or shrank in the last three months, or deals that moved into or out of a given target period.
• See How Forecast Amounts Have Changed
  Let's build a historical report, in matrix format, of the amounts your team members have assigned to each forecast category. Changes in those amounts can reveal how accurately your team is forecasting.
• Track History for Cases
  Monitor activity across cases and identify your case status changes in the last three months of a case’s life cycle.
• Limitations on Historical Trend Reporting
  Historical trending in Salesforce is subject to certain limits on the time during which data is tracked, the number of rows of data, and the fields and objects you can track. These limits are designed to restrict the data set so that reports return data quickly.
• Filter Historical Report Data
  When you filter on a historical field in a historical trending report, you specify a past date or date range in addition to an operator and value. Results are returned if the filter criteria are true during the historical date range.