In order for Elements to have the correct Profile data to analyse you will need to have the Elements Managed Package installed, and the Profile batch jobs are scheduled.

This is done via the Scheduled Jobs tab in the "Elements Settings" app in Salesforce.

For further information, this article gives in depth explanation of these batch jobs and their importance.

Without the Profile metadata batch job you will only be able to run reports on Permission Set metadata.

The types of report you can run are as follows:

Click through the links to understand more about how to generate and understand these reports.

Outlined below are the recommended steps to help you analyse and understand the permissions in your Org, so that you can begin to either migrate your profiles to permission sets, or to consolidate permissions more generally.

You can start by running the org-wide report (Profile/permission sets access categories) to get a picture of the types of access given by all the profiles and permission sets in your org.

Click on the blue links on the left hand side to open up the metadata node in the Elements metadata dictionary. From here, you can easily move onto the next step which is running the access report.

From the node, click on the "Optimize/clean-up" tab in the right panel, and click "Analyze access".

This will show you the total permission access given by this permission controller, and the number of each type of permission it grants.

Click on the grey numbers to drill into the permissions. This example shows all the fieldPermissions allocated and the type of permission for each field.

The next step is to compare the permissions to the other profiles or permission sets of interest. You can compare one to one, or one to many, profiles and/or permission sets in your org. Do this by selecting the "Compare" button once you've opened the "Analyze Access" window.

Add a title and description for the comparison - this will help you find it later. Click "Continue".

Select the permissions you want to compare to your selected metadata. You can decide to compare one or many permissions controllers at once. When you're done, click "Compare".

The reports will show you a heatmap of similarities/differences between the profiles and permission sets. The % denotes the % similarities, and so the greener boxes have a lower % as they contain less similarities. We also display the number of items compared.

Example of a one-to-one comparison:

Example of a one-to-many comparison:

Click on the lozenge along the top row (total) (arrow 1) to drill into a one-to-one comparison report. Click on the individual permission comparisons (arrow 2) to drill into the specific differences.

Finally, you should document the changes required after you've done your analysis. Do this by creating a user story easily from the reporting window.

To do this, from the comparison report, click on the header of the metadata you want to add to the new story. The column will turn grey when selected.

When you have selected all the appropriate metadata, click "Create story". This will open the new story window and you can fill in the information required.

Once created, your new story will be available to view in the right panel from that metadata, as well as in the Changes grid.

Need a copy of the reports? All of the above reports can be downloaded. The Org-wide report can be downloaded as an XLS file, and all of the others as CSV files. Simply look for the Export to CSV button or Export to Excel buttons in the corner of the windows.