Account Hierarchy Reporting
Summary
The article tackles the common Salesforce need to report on Account Hierarchies beyond the standard UI visualization, which requires record-level navigation. It outlines a straightforward approach using a Custom Report Type to provide both upward and downward visibility of accounts in hierarchy, enabling teams to see hierarchical relationships directly in reports. This method avoids complex automation and formula fields, making it ideal for Salesforce teams needing easy-to-build, exportable hierarchy reports for ownership and relationship insights.
Takeaways
- Use a Custom Report Type to report on Account Hierarchies effectively.
- Avoid overcomplicating with formula fields or automation for hierarchy visibility.
- Custom reports can show both upward and downward account relationships.
- Reports help identify account hierarchy during ownership reassignment.
- Configure custom sections and related lookup fields in the Report Type.
Recently, a customer of mine had a request to be to report on their Account Hierarchies. The out of the box UI display does a good job of visually presenting how Accounts are related to one another. However, this requires you to click into an Account record in order to see this. This use case that my client had was that they wanted to be able to see the hierarchy in a Report to help identify whether an Account was part of a hierarchy when reassigning Account ownership. As I was solutioning what the best approach would be, I considered adding formula fields on the Account, or maybe lookups with automation. Both of these options give upward hierarchy visibility, but don’t offer any downward visibility. I also did not want to overcomplicate the build and since they only need to see the hierarchy in a Report or exported spreadsheet I determined that a Custom report Type would be the simplest and best solution.