Whether you’re dealing with Leads, Accounts or Opportunities keeping in touch with the folks associated with each is key to a successful sales organization.  Salesforce provides a rather odd field called ‘Last Activity’ for leads, accounts, and opportunities that is the last date an activity was conducted with the entity.

It’s odd because, while it’s available for user in list views and reports it isn’t available to place on the entity’s screen.

So this is a great field, but by using it in a formula field to calculate Days Since Last Activity is more useful as it can be used everywhere in Salesforce and lets you easily create reports and views such as Open Opportunities with No Activity in 30 Days.

So, for opportunities, here’s what the formula field for Days Since Last Activity would look like:

That formula would be the same for leads and accounts as well, you’d just need to create formula fields for those objects.

You can place it anywhere on the page layout but here you can see it as it would be displayed within the System Information section.

For a report, you can set the filter criteria so that you’re seeing all opportunities that have a Days Since Last Activity as greater than 30 or blank so you pick up  both.