Salesforce Events – Closed or Open?

Do you know what determines whether a Salesforce Event Activity displays in the “Open Activities” related list or the “Activity History” related list?  Let’s start with an event activity with a start/end date in the past:

This record displays on the Account detail page within the “Activity History” related list, not the “Open Activities” section.

What about when you are selecting to view Open or Completed Activities within a Salesforce Report?

Events Are Automatically Completed/Closed

Salesforce documentation indicates “All events will automatically be moved to the Activity History the day following the scheduled event date.”  In other words, unlike tasks where they are manually marked “complete” – events are automatically completed after the scheduled date has past.

I found this very interesting because I’ve seen events appear “completed” on the same day as the scheduled start/end date.

A Warning About Utilizing Report Data

Within Salesforce Reports, there is a field labeled “Closed.”  This field indicates whether the task or event record has been completed.  This isn’t an actual field on the record and cannot be found within the database utilizing a SOQL query.

The issue with Events is that the same exact “Closed” field can display different results depending on whether it is a standard or custom report type.

The same record above that displays in the “Completed Activities” related list displays as “Closed” = True in the standard activity report type:

However, when using a custom report type the same record displays as “Closed” = False.

Come on Salesforce!  This can’t be by design, can it?!  I can only assume that because it’s really a ‘faux field’ and the report is determining whether the event is closed or not that this logic was only applied to the standard report types.

This can be dangerous particularly if you were using this field in a CRT as filter criteria or using this field to aggregate – sum/avg/etc across all activities.

What are your thoughts or issues with Events?  Have you created a custom field to let users manually indicate whether they have completed the activity?  There are numerous ideas on the Success Community regarding the way Events are marked complete.  Here’s one.  Please let me know your thoughts in the comments or on twitter @SFDC_r – I would love to hear from you!