As a salesforce admin, there are always situations where your custom reports grows and folders grow with them based on your business needs. It comes to a situation where there are  more than 100 report folders with more than 100 custom reports built. We are at a loss to find out which reports we use and which reports we need to delete or clean up. If we do not do regular clean up, it can become a mess to find existing reports and clean unwanted fields. So how do you find out which reports are really used in dashboards and which reports are really used by your users?

Steve Mo posted a solution for it and i just implemented this solution which can become a quick handy tool for admins to check impacted reports and clean them.

1. Create a custom report type using reports a primary object and dashboard as related object.

2. Create a new custom report called Impacted reports which uses the new custom report type.

3. Pull up report name, title, folder, dashboard component , last run and dashboard component and create a summary report grouped by folder run.

4. Run the report and you should now see all reports using dashboard components on all your folders. This would show your most valuable reports which you can save.

5. If you filter the report by last run date and see reports which has not run for the last 3 years, this can be a candidate for clean up for later.

This report should help to identify your commonly used reports and help to weed out the unwanted ones. If you do not clean up your unused reports, it would become to hard to delete unwanted fields and create a bottle neck for future expansion. Check the below screen shot for reference.

Sample report below

With this report, salesforce admins can quickly identify reports to be cleaned up and impact of reports on dashboards and become a proactive salesforce admin. With summer 14 release, these unused reports can also be deleted .  Please feel free to post your comments and send me an email to buyan47@gmail.com for any questions.