How Do I Know Which Salesforce Reports and Dashboards Are Being Used?

Open up your org's Reports tab and scroll. Somewhere in there is the "Q3 Pipeline by Segment" dashboard someone asked for eighteen months ago. There's the renewals report you rebuilt for CS after their last reorg. There's a folder called "Legacy - Do Not Delete" that nobody, including you, remembers the reasoning behind.

Which of these does anyone actually open?

You'd think this would be an easy question. It isn't. Salesforce will tell you plenty about the records living inside your org — who created what, who edited it, when — but reports and dashboards are a different animal. They're not records people are editing. They're things people either look at or don't, and "looking" is exactly the behavior Salesforce is worst at capturing.

This matters more than it sounds like it should. Based on Oniic's customer surveys, most orgs have thousands of reports and dashboards sitting in their instance, and as much as 88% of them go unused. That's not a rounding error. That's most of what your team has built, sitting there doing nothing, while you keep getting asked to build more.

The field everyone reaches for first

If you've gone looking for usage data before, you've probably found LastRunDate or LastReferencedDate on the report or dashboard record. It looks like exactly what you need. It mostly isn't.

LastRunDate tells you the last time something was refreshed — not who refreshed it, and not how often. The "New Business Pipeline" dashboard you built for the sales team could show a timestamp from this morning because the VP checked it before her 9am, or because one AE happened to click into it looking for a number on an unrelated deal. Same field, two completely different stories, and you have no way to tell them apart.

It's also just one moment frozen in time. Check it on a Friday and it tells you Friday's story. It won't tell you whether that report got opened once this week or fifteen times. Ask five different admins and you'll probably hear five different levels of trust in this field — mostly low, and for good reason.

What you're actually trying to figure out

The real question isn't "when was this last refreshed." It's "who is actually opening this, and on what kind of cadence." Is the "New Business Pipeline" dashboard part of someone's Monday routine, or did it get opened twice around launch and never again? Is the case-aging report support leadership asked for actually driving their weekly stand-up, or did that conversation move to a spreadsheet three weeks in and nobody told you?

Answering that at the level of an individual report — let alone across a few thousand of them — isn't something Salesforce gives you a native path to.

This is the gap RecordWatch closes. It's the first Salesforce-native solution on the AppExchange built specifically to show you who's viewing a given report or dashboard, when, and how often, down to the individual click. Instead of inferring usage from a single stale timestamp, you can pull up the "New Business Pipeline" dashboard's actual view history — every person, every date, every week — the same way you'd report on any other object in your org. Roll it up by team, by role, by month, or drill into a single user's activity on a single dashboard. Either direction, you're looking at real behavior instead of guessing from a proxy.

And the absence of activity is just as useful as the presence of it. If a report hasn't been opened by anyone in two months, that's not a mystery anymore — it's a candidate for archiving, and one less thing cluttering the folder everyone scrolls past to find the report they actually need.

Building the question in from the start

Once you can actually see usage, the more useful move is to stop treating "build the dashboard" and "check if it worked" as separate conversations that happen months apart. Define what success looks like before the project starts, not after someone asks in a QBR why the dashboard from last quarter never came up again.

That might mean the requesting team agrees to a weekly review cadence you'll check against. It might mean the new report is explicitly replacing an old spreadsheet, so usage should show up on the days that spreadsheet used to get updated. Either way, you've got something concrete to hold the data against instead of just hoping the thing catches on.

It also changes how requests come in. "Sure, we'll build that" stops being the whole answer. It becomes "sure, we'll build that, and we'll actually know in a month whether it's getting used" — which tends to make people think a little harder before asking for report number 4,001.

Cleaning up isn't just tidiness

An unused report isn't just clutter to clear out during a spring-cleaning project. It's information. Maybe the "Legacy — Do Not Delete" folder exists because someone was afraid to delete something without knowing if it mattered — now you can just check. Maybe half your dashboards duplicate each other because three different admins built near-identical views for three different requesters who never talked to each other. Maybe a report that was essential during a specific initiative simply outlived that initiative and nobody circled back.

Knowing what's actually being used — and by whom — turns "clean up the reports folder" from a guessing game into an actual project with a defined scope. It also protects the reports that are working. When someone eventually asks whether Ops adds value, "here's what's actually driving decisions across the org, and here's what we retired because nobody needed it" is a much better answer than a folder count.

The next report or dashboard someone asks you to build doesn't have to join the pile of things nobody checks on again. You can build it, watch what happens after launch, and use that to make the next request — and the next 4,000 reports sitting in your org — a little more deliberate. 

For a closer look at what dashboard-specific visibility looks like for leadership requests specifically, see our post on whether leadership is actually looking at the dashboards you built them. And if you want to see what real usage tracking looks like across your whole org, RecordWatch is built to answer exactly this.

FAQ

How do I find out if a Salesforce report or dashboard is actually being used? Out of the box, Salesforce only gives you LastRunDate or LastReferencedDate, which shows the last time a report or dashboard was refreshed by anyone — not who viewed it or how often. RecordWatch tracks individual views on reports and dashboards, so you can see exactly who opened something and when, instead of relying on a single stale timestamp.

Why isn't LastRunDate a reliable usage metric? It only captures one moment in time and overwrites all other instances. A VP reviewing a dashboard every Monday and a rep who clicked into it once by accident can produce the exact same timestamp. It also can't tell you whether something was viewed once or a dozen times since you last checked.

How many Salesforce reports and dashboards actually go unused? Based on Oniic's customer surveys, most organizations have thousands of reports and dashboards, and up to 88% of them go unused.

What is RecordWatch? RecordWatch is a Salesforce-native application, available on the AppExchange, that reports on record, report, and dashboard views — showing who looked at what, when, and how often, down to the individual user.

Should I set usage expectations before building a new report? Yes. Agreeing on what "in use" looks like — a review cadence, a spreadsheet it's meant to replace, a specific team checking in regularly — gives you something concrete to measure against once the view data starts coming in, instead of guessing months later whether the report is actually working.