by Mike Walsh | Jan 23, 2015 | Salesforce Tips
Here at CloudMyBiz, we’re big proponents of formula fields. We’ve shared with you hundreds of formulas that can do anything from formatting data for document merging, to figuring out the exact age of a customer, to even showing dynamic images to help give your team important at-a-glance information. A lot of these formulas get pretty fancy, but what if you need to get down to the numbers and calculate important financials like you’re already doing on an old spreadsheet? Can Salesforce really replace your spreadsheets and give you numbers like compound interest or gross margin percent? In short, totally!
Anything a standard spreadsheet program can do, formulas in Salesforce can do, and generally better. Take for example calculating compound interest: Principal__c * ( 1 + Rate__c / M ) ^ ( T * M) ). Or maybe you need to calculate gross margin: Total_Sales__c - Cost_of_Goods_Sold__c. Salesforce has provided a list of common financial formulas that can give you a fantastic jumping off point for all your financial calculation needs. And if you can’t find what you need there, I find one of the easiest ways to build the formula I need is to open up one of my old spreadsheets with the formula, then paste and translate it into Salesforce. Once you’ve got your calculations working, check out some of the other formulas and start thinking about how to take your formulas to the next level!
-Jared and the Salesforce Guys
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Oct 24, 2014 | Salesforce Tips
Everyone knows that it’s poor etiquette to ask someone their age, and even worse to skew it in the wrong (read: upward) direction when you do need to confirm it. There’s a bunch of formulas out there for calculating someone’s age (or just the number of years between any two dates), but the simple ones have a tendency to be off by as much as a week or more, and the more complicated ones can be difficult to understand if you find a bug. Your team shouldn’t have to stop and do the math before asking that ever difficult question, and they shouldn’t have to go red in the face wishing a happy 21st birthday to someone who’s already been to the bar. You especially don’t want to send someone a Senior Citizen’s discount too early or offer an insurance package they’re not eligible for. You need a simple, clean formula that gets it right every time. Look no further!
This gem comes to you from the Developerforce Cookbook site and essentially operates on the principal of the Futurama Birthday Song (what day is today; it’s so-and-so’s birthday). All you need is a date field (here, they’ve used a custom field called DOB) and you’re ready to create your formula. IF( MONTH(TODAY())>MONTH(DOB__c), YEAR(TODAY())-YEAR(DOB__c), IF(AND(MONTH(TODAY()) = MONTH(DOB__c), DAY(TODAY()) >= DAY(DOB__c)), YEAR(TODAY())-YEAR(DOB__c), (YEAR(TODAY())-YEAR(DOB__c))-1) ) . With this formula you’ll always have the right age.
-Jared and the Salesforce Guys
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Jun 26, 2014 | Salesforce Tips
We here at CloudMyBiz love Salesforce formulas! They can do more than just sum up a few values or spit out an average. In the past, we’ve told you about using formula fields to display images and even calculate business days between two dates, but that doesn’t even start to tell the whole story. When I started using Salesforce, I remember pigeonholing formulas into the few basic examples I was used to in Excel, low-level programming algorithms, and the handful of examples I’d seen in this or that forum. I didn’t realize that formulas in Salesforce open up a whole world of possibilities! Let me give you a few examples.
Whether you’re using the Sales or Service Cloud, ensuring a good load balance with Assignment Rules is crucial. Without formulas, it can be tricky to handle. But using a basic Mod function, you can set up Round Robin assignments in just a few minutes. If your company likes to send birthday wishes to customers, it can be a challenge to identify who you’ve got coming up. A formula and a quick report or list view can show you who has a birthday in the current month. All this and 98 other ideas are waiting for you with Salesforce’s 100 Sample Formulas to Get You Started. Check it out and try your hand at one today!
-Jared and the Salesforce Guys
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Dec 6, 2013 | Salesforce Tips
When time is of the essence and you need to make a decision fast, you don’t have time to read. You just want your system to “show me the money!” Consider this:
You’re on the phone with a potential customer your team has been working for the last few weeks and their general attitude is “shut up and take my money!” You have all the information you need right in front of you. Now, all you need to know is if they qualify, but that requires reviewing a bunch of different fields, and every second you delay, your lead is growing more impatient. Your admin might have added a text formula field to tell you this, but you still have to sift through all the other nearly identical fields. All you want is a big thumbs-up so you can make the sale. Well, Salesforce can do that for you!
Salesforce formula fields are an invaluable tool for checking and validating information on a record, giving you dynamic feedback, and performing complex calculations instantly. But did you know that you can use a formula field to display an image? Simply use the IMAGE() tag for the formula’s output and you can show your team the lead they’re working is qualified with a big thumbs-up, warn them an account is overdue with a fat red X, flag a contact on their birthday, or show your customer support team exactly which cases came from Facebook, Twitter, Email, and the Web without cluttering their list views.
Read more here, and enjoy your awesome new page layouts!
-Jared and the Salesforce Guys
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
