Summarizing reports by owner name is one of the many useful aspects of Salesforce. But if you sell through partners, you probably want to see leads and opportunities based on the partner company name rather than the partner employee name. This way, you can easily understand partner performance. Should be easy, right?

Well, yes. In fact, it’s very easy. And yet, I’m constantly amazed by how many companies operate without even realizing this option exists.

Consider the following example. The report on the left summarizes partner owned leads by the partner account, whereas the report on the right summarizes by partner user/owner.

Which option would you prefer?

If you want to summarize reports by partner name rather than by owner name, all you have to do is activate the ‘Partner Account’ field. This native feature of Salesforce Partners automatically populates this read only field with the name of the partner account based on who the record owner is.  So if Fred Jones works for Acme Resellers the Partner Account field will automatically show Acme Resellers.

This is especially important for vendors that have a lot of partners and do not necessarily know the names of all partner employees. Aggregating to a higher level – like Partner Account – is key for reporting.

So why do so many companies continue to sift through reports by owner name when it would be easier to view them by partner account? Truth be told, the reason is that while the field shows up within setup when Salesforce Partners is enabled, the field level security defaults to NOT visible for all profiles, so you never see the field on the lead or opportunity record or in the reporting tab.

If grouping by partner account is important to you, then do the savvy thing and turn on the partner account field. Administrators, here is your implementation checklist:

• Turn on the field level security for all profiles that need to see the Partner Account Field. This needs to be done for both the lead and opportunity object.

• Put the Partner Account Field on page layouts for records you expect partner users to own. I recommend putting it directly below the owner name.

• Create canned reports and dashboards summarized by Partner Account and add a constraint ‘Partner Account Not Equal’ to blank value in order to limit the report to partner owner records.

Since the Partner Account field is only native to the lead and opportunity objects, in an upcoming tech blog I will share code with you to show you how to automatically populate the partner account field on custom objects based on the record owner.

To the point…

• Summarizing reports by partner account name with Salesforce Partners is easy
• The Partner Account field is native to Salesforce Partners, though is often overlooked
• Administrators need to turn on field level security to allow users to summarize by partner account

Apprivo can help with a free security consultation Contact Us.