This forum post will run through how to display a report on a new tab in your Case records to show previous cases for the employer of the Primary Contact.  The screenshot below shows an example of how it would appear within Cases:

What are Cases used for?

Cases can be used for multiple purposes in Workbooks. For example:

• within a Support team to log queries raised by customers.
• within a Service Delivery team to handle complaints, product returns or calls.
• by Consultants for Implementation projects or Customer At-Risk Cases.
• the whole company could benefit from the visibility of using Cases.

Why should I make this change?

Adding a tab to Cases to show previous Cases for the same company has many advantages, such as:

• raising awareness of other issues that are currently open with that customer.
• to avoid duplication of existing cases.
• identify repeating issues - this will help resolve an issue based on that previous resolution, but may also help to identify a need for training. 

How do I make this change?

The steps below run through how to create a report and display it as a tab on Cases.

Step 1: Create a report based on Cases

Navigate to Start > New > Report > Create a new blank report > Cases

Step 2: Add the columns that are relevant to you

On the Details tab add the columns that are the most relevant and contain important information. If you use Cases for Support, you may find the following columns useful:

• Assigned to name
• Case Number
• Created at
• Id
• Name
• Product Category
• Status
• Summary
• Type
• Resolution Description - The field will have <div> at the beginning by default because the text is displayed in HTML. To change that, open the column, go to the Advanced tab and select ‘Display as plain text’ as shown below.

To be able to constrain this report by Contact employer name, you’ll need to add the appropriate column. Drill through to ‘Contact employer’ to get the name of the Organisations, as shown below.

It may be useful to sort Cases in a descending order, so that most recent Cases appear at the top. To do that, right-click on the ‘Created at’ column and select ‘Sort descending'.

Step 3: Add criteria to restrict your results

You may want to restrict your results to the specific type of Cases. In this example, we chose to display only Support Call Cases. We’ve restricted results by adding a criterion that says ‘Type is Support Call’ as shown below.

Step 4: Display as a tab on Case records

Once you’ve created a report, you can then display it as a tab on Case records. To achieve that, you need to:

1. Create a new custom field of type ‘Report’ on Case records. Go to Configuration > Customisation > Record Types > Fields tab and click New Custom Field > Report.
2. Name the field appropriately, select the report that you’ve just created
3. Tick ‘Show as a tab’ checkbox.

You may want to be able to see the full report on Case records or only relevant Cases. For example, only display those Cases that were raised by employees of the same Organisation. It’s possible to constrain report contents by a specific field as shown below.

If you add a constraint that says ‘Id doesn’t equal Id’, this means that the case that you’re currently looking at will be excluded from the report.

NOTE: It’s not possible to constrain the report by native Case picklists, like Product Category, Type, Status, Source or Priority.

Step 5: Amend the position of the tab (if required)

The will appear as a tab on a default form layout, but you may want to amend which form layouts this field should appear on and the position of the tab itself. If the tab will be used very often, you may want to move it towards the middle and display it after emails as shown below.

You now have a report that is easily accessible via a tab on Cases. If you have a lot of records, you can apply filters to your Similar Cases tab and narrow down your search results.

How else could I use this?

Adding a tab to a record template doesn't only apply to Cases, in-fact you can use this concept in lots of other ways, including on:

• Opportunities - See what other Opportunities exist for Organisations in the same industry to have visibility of what products may also be of interest.
• Marketing Campaigns - If you run different types of marketing campaigns, you could have a report constrained by a custom field called 'Campaign Type' to see all previous campaigns run of that type.
• Quotes - See what has been quoted to that customer before. You can get this information via the Related items tab if all of the previous Quotes have been related, but this allows you to show custom columns like 'Discount applied'.