Adding what I’ll call “helper fields” to your Salesforce instance is a quick and easy win for System Administrators. “Helper fields” is a broad term encompassing fields to add to perform simple calculations for users, uncover hidden insights into records, track the progress of a record through a series of stages or statuses, and other tasks. By using basic salesforce.com tools such as formula fields, custom fields, workflow rules, and field updates, you can build a system for gathering additional information about your current sales processes. Helper fields will make analysis easier for your end users, provide new insights into data and processes for executives, provide Sales Operations with a baseline for measuring changes to stages/statuses, and more. The sky's the limit with helper fields; it all depends on what you build for your unique business needs.

I suggest that the basic helper fields laid out below be leveraged in some way, shape, or form in every Salesforce instance. These fields build upon out-of-the-box Salesforce processes such as lead conversion and opportunity pipeline, and they can be tailored and expanded upon as desired.

Lead Create to Convert Age

ConvertedDate - DATEVALUE(CreatedDate)

This formula is useful for closed-loop reporting and reporting on your lead conversion process. It simply displays the number of days between a lead’s create date and the date it was converted.

Lead Conversion Flag

Checkbox defaulted to checked

Another field for closed-loop reporting. We set the field to default to checked and map it to a corresponding custom field on the opportunity record. This allows you to quickly confirm whether an opportunity originated as a lead record in Salesforce, or if it was directly created as an opportunity.

Days Since

TODAY() - [Date field]

Tracks the number of days since an event was recorded. Facilitates quantifying how long ago something happened so you can save your end users the simple math and to quickly calculate this for a large number of records in reports and dashboards. Could be used with Last Activity fields, for instance.

Days Until

[Date field] – Today()

The partner field for Days Since. Calculates the number of days until a future event. Useful for counting down to a deadline.

Opportunity Age

IF(OR(isPickval( StageName, "Closed Won"),(isPickval(StageName, "Closed Lost"))), CloseDate - DATEVALUE(CreatedDate) , TODAY() - DATEVALUE(CreatedDate))

Useful formula to help you and your end users calculate either how long an open opportunity record has been in Salesforce.com or how long an opportunity took to close.

Stage/Status DateTime Stamps

Date/DateTime field + Workflow rule + Field Update

To gain greater insight into how quickly your records are moving through a number of stages/statuses you will need a Date or DateTime field (depending on the granularity desired), a workflow rule, and a workflow field update so that when a status or stage is updated the date/datetime is captured in the related field. You could also add additional formula fields to calculate the number of days between the stage/status changes as captured in the date/datetime fields.

Complete ID

CASESAFEID(Id)

This formula will populate the complete 18-digit salesforce.com record ID. As a salesforce.com System Administrator, you’re going to need the 18-digit ID at some point, so you may as well create this field along with other helper fields.

Hopefully, this blog has inspired you to investigate relevant helper fields for your company to pull out additional insights from existing data, deploy formula fields to save end users time by performing simple calculations for them, or plan a system of relevant helper fields tailored to your instance and your company’s goals.

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