Cloudy's Chalkboard: Create Roll-up Summaries

Roll-up Summary fields are a way to view accumulated data from Detail records on a Master Record in Salesforce.  The Roll-up can calculate sums, counts, minimums or maximums.

A Rollup Summary on an Account (Organization) record could calculate the total of all related Opportunities (or Donations).  It could also show the maximum or largest sale on each account.  Your salespeople would have a quick gauge of how much a customer has bought and might be willing to buy, and you can run reports showing your best customers.

A Roll-Up Summary field can be created on any Master record in a Master-Detail relationship, including any custom objects.  Follow Cloudy's instructions to create a Roll-Up Summary in your Salesforce Org, and you may soon wonder how you lived without them!

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For this example, we will create a Roll-up Summary showing the total value of all Closed-Won Opportunities on an Account record.  You can follow the same steps to create a Roll-up on any Master record with related detail records.

1) Go to Your Name > Setup > Customize > Accounts > Fields




2) Click the "New" button in the "Custom Fields and Relationships" area.

(Click on any image to view larger)

3)Select "Roll-Up Summary" as the field type and click "Next".

4) Name your field.  For this example, let's name it "Account Sales Total" and in the Help & Description fields, we will indicate that only Closed-Won Opportunities are summed.  Click "Next".

5) From the "Select Object to Summarize" picklist, select "Opportunities".

Under "Select Roll-Up Type", choose "SUM", and from the "Field to Aggregate" picklist, select "Amount."

In the "Filter Criteria" section, we will set the parameters to only include Closed Won Opportunities.  Select the "Only certain records..." radio button, which opens up the Filter Criteria picklists.  For our example, we will set a filter of "Stage + Equals + Closed Won".

6) Click "Next", "Next", and "Save" to finish creating the field.  Go to the page layout for Accounts to set the placement of the new field, and then view it on your Account records!

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Roll-up summaries are a great way to get better insight into your data, both at the record-level and for reporting.  As you start to leverage the power of roll-up summaries, you might find you wish you had greater flexibility than Salesforce roll-ups allow.  For instance: the ability to roll-up from activities, or between Look-up related objects.  For these cases, Rollup Helper, on the Salesforce AppExchange might be just the ticket.  Tune in next week for a Cloudy's full review of this powerful App.

If you would like more help with creating and reporting on Roll-up Summaries in your Salesforce.com org, Contact Us!

Read more Cloudy's Chalkboard tutorials:
Creating Dashboards
Grouped Bar Charts