Why you MUST make users subscribe to reports for themselves and stop subscribing on their behalf.

I went to subscribe to a report this week and couldn’t; I’d reached the maximum limit for report subscriptions!

How, I asked myself, was this possible? I hardly ever subscribe to reports…I can’t have reached the limit (which is 5 FYI).

First things first, how do you find out which reports you are subscribed to? In Lightning, I navigate to the Reports tab > All Reports, then sort based on the Subscribed column. You’ll see all the reports you are subscribed to with a tick in this column.

Straight away I can see that I don’t even receive most of these reports?!

To see what’s going on, I open one of the reports, then choose Subscribe. From here, I can see everyone subscribed to the report, and as anticipated, I’m not on it. This report is set up to send to one of my users. I know this, I created the report for them and subscribed on their behalf (because I’m nice like that).

Surely subscribing on someone’s behalf can’t count towards your own limit?! It does 😠.

Why it does this is a mystery to me, but I’ve confirmed with Salesforce Support that it is working as expected, e.g. it’s meant to do this…

Lesson learned: in future, show users how to subscribe to their own reports.

Aside from counting towards your own subscription limit, it’s always better to teach our users to be as self sufficient as possible. It empowers them and takes some of the pressure off us – winning all round.

Useful links

Schedule and Subscribe to Reports