Take Your Sugar Reporting to the Next Level – May 2025

Our May Social Club session on May 8th was all about reporting, and we covered a lot of great tips and tricks! With Sugar’s reporting functionalities continuing to evolve, there was no shortage of creative ideas and enthusiastic discussion around how to use them more effectively. A big thank you to Lydia Manger and Andrew Yeates, who shared their expertise on Sugar's standard report functionality and Enhanced Forecasting using Sugar Discover. Here’s a look at what we covered and some of the key takeaways.

Getting More from Report Filters & Dashboards

Andy walked us through some powerful ways to take advantage of report filters within dashboards and how they can simplify workflows and improve adoption across teams. These filters can help users quickly toggle between views, focusing on territories, teams, and more, without needing to build separate dashboards for each variation. To use this feature, configure “Run Time Filters” on your reports and then add those reports to your dashboard.

A few tips that stood out:

• To make dashboards even more actionable, use row and column reports (instead of list views) so users can both visualize and directly access records without drilling into a separate page.
• Ownership of dashboards matters as only the creator can edit filters, so users need to duplicate the dashboard, making their own copy, to make changes.
• Several attendees also shared that they don’t allow their teams to create their own reports, prompting a discussion about how this affects how users create and manage their dashboards. 

Understanding the Last Interaction Field

We took a quick detour from reporting to discuss the new Last Interaction Date field, added in the recent 25.1 release. This field reflects calls and meetings associated with the account, but doesn’t (yet) include emails or other activities, so we discussed its use and benefits and how that may affect organizations differently depending on how you communicate and engage with contacts and accounts. There was also a great reminder to avoid overloading custom versions of this field with too much logic. Instead, consider using separate fields for each type of activity (like “Last Case Date” or “Last Opportunity Date”) to provide more clarity and structure for users, as defined customer touchpoints may vary between organizations.

Enhanced Forecasting and Sugar Discover

Lydia then took us deeper into Enhanced Forecasting/Service Insights (Sugar Discover), which is especially useful for teams looking to analyze how data has changed over time. Traditional reporting in Sugar (Sell, Serve, and Enterprise) shows what your data looks like today, while Enhanced Forecasting in Discover gives you historical context, helping you track how your pipeline has evolved over time, such as comparing pipeline values by week, quarter, or other time intervals.

Some additional highlights:

• The Waterfall Report in Discover helps pinpoint exactly what changed: what was added, removed, closed, or shifted in value, helping teams make more informed decisions.
• You can use pivot reporting on the Discover side to cross-reference data with Sugar, focusing on specific record IDs and comparing the different snapshots over time.
• There were also examples of using Discover to report on case data, such as tracking escalation trends, the number of open cases over time, and seeing how those metrics shift.
• When building out reports, make sure to start simple, validate your results, and then build in complexity.

Looking Ahead

Our next  Social Club session will take place on June 12th, Social Club: Doc Merge Tips & Tricks. We’ll explore practical ways to use Doc Merge to streamline processes and make document generation more consistent and user-friendly.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for this session, and to Lydia and Andy for sharing so many great tips and recommendations. Hope to see you next time!