Auditing Your Salesforce Org

The end of the year typically means fewer meetings and a quieter office. For many of us, this is the time of year to get some real, uninterrupted work done! With people out of the office and some time to focus, I like to leverage the quiet and get some special work done.

Just like a vehicle, Salesforce should undergo some regular maintenance but a lot of times this doesn’t happen. Performing a regular audit helps to keep your instance organized and running smoothly.

Reports & Dashboards

We’re going to start easy. With everyone being able to generate reports, there is a lot of trash. Many individuals create a one-time report for a specific purpose but never go back to delete it. With the Summer ’14 release, administrators are now able to delete reports through the Setup UI using filter criteria.

Work with your stakeholders to determine what should be deleted. When I did this internally, I generated a report on reports and pulled in last run date to understand what reports are being used. As a business we decided to delete everything that hadn’t been run in the last year. This resulted in over 900 reports purged from Salesforce!

To delete reports from Salesforce, click Setup | Data Management | Mass Delete Records | Mass Delete Reports.

Once there, enter the filter criteria. In my instance, I used only the last run date as a filter. Don’t worry, Salesforce won’t delete any reports that are being used in a dashboard.

Salesforce doesn’t give us the ability to mass delete dashboards so this will be more of a manual process. Review the existing dashboards in your org and determine what can be removed. Purge at will and as you do so, you’ll feel good for de-cluttering!

AppExchange Apps

Often times AppExchange apps get installed and we tend to forget about them but they need some lovin’ every now and again. It’s easy to install free apps to evaluate them so during this audit, take some time to review what is installed and if it is being used. If not, delete it from production.

Keep in mind that deleting AppExchange apps can be tedious depending on the app as sometimes they infiltrate the org. Uninstalling an app can be like trying to unwrap a present wrapped in duct tape.

Once the unused apps are uninstalled, review the remaining apps and determine if any of them need to be updated. Not all apps notify customers that there is a newer version available. Easy find what apps have updates available by navigating to Help & Training, clicking your profile photo then My Account. Once there, you’ll see a screen similar to this one.

Click the update button for the AppExchange apps that require an update and go through the install process. Be sure to check the change log for all apps that are being updated to validate that there is no negative impact to your org.

User Permissions

This audit is particularly important if there are multiple admins who can make changes to user permissions or if there have been recent changes to profiles and permission sets. Security is an important part of Salesforce. Make sure it is working correctly be auditing permissions across the board.

PermComparitor is a free app built on Heroku that will allow users to view permissions across profiles, permission sets or users. See similar and different permissions and determine what if any changes need to be made.

Workflows, Validation Rules & Email Templates

As workflow and validation rules get turned off, we leave them in place just in case we need to reactivate them. There are probably several workflow and validation rules that could be fully deleted. Review these rules and purge what is not needed. While you’re at it, update the description fields if necessary to help identify what the rule does.

Email templates are also candidates for deletion – especially those tied to the inactive workflows. Delete what is not being used any longer to tidy up the template folders.

Let’s Get to Work

Whew! With all of this work, you are going to need some good music to listen to. Here’s a playlist I put together. Hopefully it makes your audit more enjoyable!

What other items would you suggest auditing? Leave a comment below!