Advantages Rollup Helper Has Over Flow
2022/09/27

Rollups are often necessary to get data on Objects or to build reports, but there are several limitations.
One of the biggest obstacles is that standard rollups can only be used between Objects with a Master-Detail relationship. This results in Admins turning to other tools to create rollups when they are between Objects with a Lookup relationship, or even when they need to create hierarchy rollups within the same Object. Users can be tempted to create these rollups with Flow, but as we describe further, there are limitations in Flow. Our AppExchange app, Rollup Helper, offers significant advantages over Flow as it is a tool purposely built to create and manage all your rollup needs.
Limitations Experienced with Flow
- Difficult to debug.
- You need to create two flows for every rollup to ensure data stays accurate: one to trigger when records are created or updated, and another for when records are deleted. This creates unnecessary work for the Admin.
- Can’t have multiple run modes at the same time without having duplicated flows (e.g., you can't have real time, invocable, and scheduled runs at the same time).
- Further, you can only run scheduled flows daily or monthly.
- Limitations for all editions including 50 versions per flow. These limitations are more restrictive for Essentials or Professional Editions, which include just five active flows per flow type, and five total flows per flow type. Here are the full lists of general flow limits and per-transaction flow limits.
Rollup Helper's Advantages Help Admins Overcome Limitations with Flow
- Simple point and click Admin tool — you don’t need to define elements and resources like in Flow.
- Easy to use, navigate, and have other Admins learn.
- More features and settings available that are unique to managing rollups, such as previewing rollups, export/import rollup settings, advanced configuration options per rollup, and org wide settings to fit any company’s needs.
- Exception monitor which logs and reports exception records. Rollup Helper also has the ability to retry failed exceptions automatically to ensure your data stays accurate.
- Overall more flexibility to manage various org specific data processing needs (object record scope, asynchronous processing, multi currency support, validation helper, percentage of limits used, etc.).
- A single rollup can be run in multiple run modes (real time, manual, scheduled, asynchronous).
- When not run in real-time, you can also schedule rollups with more granularity (five-minute intervals, hourly, daily, monthly, yearly).
- Robust support and resources such as an Admin guide.
- Deployable use cases.
- Health check to monitor issues.
- Easily track the history of fields on rollups to audit changes made.
- View and manage your scheduled rollups and monitor their progress.
- Easily clone rollups and filters with a few clicks.
- Rollup Helper detects when your custom code will fail when the app runs.
- Ideal use cases include:
- Cross-Object formula fields
- Across Objects with Lookup relationship (like Contact to Account)
- Same Object hierarchy rollups (Child to Parent Accounts)
- Rollups using formulas rather than static criteria
- Targeted parent rollup
Comparison
|
Rollup Helper |
Flow |
Rollup fields between Objects that can have a Lookup relationship |
✓ |
✓ |
Hierarchy rollups within the same Object |
✓ |
✓ |
Priority support |
✓ |
|
Easy to use |
✓ |
|
Free |
First three rollups |
✓ |
Native App |
✓ |
✓ |
Error Handling |
||
Health Check page to flag potential issues |
✓ |
|
Automatically create exception records without having to create and maintain a custom Object |
✓ |
|
Retry functionality |
✓ |
|
Automatically disable settings when an error is encountered |
✓ |
|
Run frequencies |
||
Manual run |
✓ |
One flow to run manually, and a second flow to set a schedule |
Every 5 Minutes |
✓ |
|
Daily |
✓ |
✓ |
Hourly |
✓ |
|
Monthly |
✓ |
✓ |
Yearly |
✓ |
|
Flow can be difficult to learn, but even if you're a Flow master there are still benefits to using an app like Rollup Helper for rollups. It's easier to organize all of your rollups in one place, and there's less to manage, e.g., there's only one setting per rollup instead of two flows. Flows have their place, but we recommend saving yourself time and effort by only building them when you really need them. For example, when you have rollups that are bundled with other declarative processes.
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