Evan Ponter

After refining a set of best practices that I started developing in 2016, I've published a series of blog posts that detail each component of my "Deluxe Report Type" framework. I've implemented this in dozens of organizations for clients of all sizes who are all in search of the optimal configuration of Salesforce reporting tools in order to visualize and analyze the data they enter into Salesforce. Every Salesforce project has a reporting component. I am able to lean on these principals to guide decision making for data architecture, automation, and report configurations. Clients have loved how easy it is to build reports when this framework is in place because they now know where to begin and what to expect throughout the process. There's no more guess-work, no more trial-and-error. Clients are able to confidently query for conclusions in their Salesforce environment using the Deluxe Report Type framework.

Using Salesforce screen flows, I built a user experience for inputting basic lease details for a real estate company and utilized intricate flow logic to automate the creation of upwards of 45 records across 9 different objects in a multi-layer hierarchy based on the minimal amount of input from the user. This allows the client to track future revenue projections and transition those projections to collected revenue for each month's installment of payments related to those leases.

I developed a custom object and a set of Flow automation that allows privileged end-users to control when tasks are automatically created for records in certain objects. This solution dynamically allows the user to choose from a number of objects, specify criteria that records in that object must meet, and define all aspects of the task (owner, due date, type, etc) that will be created when those records meet the criteria based on values from the record meeting the criteria. The organization has many properties that have their own needs for automatic task creation and needed a way to allow end-users to have some control over these rules while streamlining the automation logic behind the scenes. The end result achieves this goal elegantly.

Using a Salesforce screen flow, I developed a solution to allow end users to specify parameters for a recurring series of campaign records and then create those records along with any additional related records that accompany them. Robust options for monthly recurrence types included a setting for repeating on the same day of the month (e.g. the 4th of the month) or the same instance of a weekday in a month (e.g. the second Tuesday of the month, the last Thursday of the month). This solution worked in any US time zone and accounted for shifts in times due to daylight saving starting or ending (or both) throughout the course of a recurring series.

A non-profit company desired to automatically send emails to members who were about to expire in order to encourage them to purchase a renewal membership. I developed all aspects of the solutions used to achieve this goal: a membership data model, a digital membership delivery method, an order form, a payment gateway configuration, logic that created monthly instances of campaign records for tracking individual messages that are to be sent, logic that used report results to automatically add expiring members to the appropriate campaign record for targeting, Marketing Cloud email templates, and scheduled send configuration that targeted the members of the appropriate campaign record from Sales Cloud. The end result showed who was sent an email, who opened an email, who clicked a link in an email, and who ultimately purchased a new membership—all without any manual effort from any staff member. This solution continues to automatically send and track emails on a daily basis for this revenue stream.