The Essential Guide to Salesforce Audits:
Maintaining Your Org’s Health

Why Your Org Needs Regular Audits

Cue the groans from Salesforce Admins the world over – we’re about to tackle that critical task everyone dreads but can’t ignore. Yes, it’s time to discuss auditing your Salesforce Org. While the thought of diving deep into your system’s inner workings might make you want to hide under your desk, a thorough audit remains one of the most powerful tools for maintaining a healthy, efficient Salesforce environment.

At its core, conducting a Salesforce audit ensures your data stays accurate and well-managed. Think of it as essential maintenance that pays dividends through better decision-making and more personalized customer experiences. Identifying and removing duplicates while pinpointing missing or inconsistent information will help you avoid massive, disruptive data cleansing projects that no one wants to face later.

Key Areas of Focus

Successfully auditing a Salesforce organization requires focused attention on several interconnected domains. What distinguishes high-performing Salesforce instances isn’t just their initial configuration, but rather the ongoing maintenance of critical components. A comprehensive audit examines multiple layers of your implementation, from granular security settings to broader system optimizations.

Through extensive experience and best practices, we at Decision Foundry have identified three primary areas that demand regular evaluation: security and compliance, process optimization, and technical debt management. Each of these components plays a vital role in maintaining a robust and efficient Salesforce implementation that continues to serve your business needs effectively.

Security and Compliance

Regular reviews of user roles, permission sets, and profiles help maintain robust data security while ensuring compliance with regulations like GDPR, PII, and CCPA. As many seasoned admins learn early in their careers, the goal is simple but vital: provide users with just enough access to perform their jobs effectively, nothing more and nothing less.

Process Optimization

Audits reveal opportunities to streamline your operations by evaluating workflows and automation rules. This process helps identify and eliminate redundant or conflicting processes, ensuring your custom triggers and email alerts perform consistently. Think of it as fine-tuning a complex machine – each adjustment improves overall performance and reliability.

Technical Debt Management

Over time, customizations and technical debt can accumulate like digital dust in the corners of your org. A thorough audit analyzes the usage of custom objects, fields, and code, helping identify underutilized features that might be cluttering your system. This systematic review makes your Salesforce instance easier to maintain and adapt as your business evolves.

Understanding Audit Scope

A Salesforce audit is a tailored evaluation designed to enhance the overall performance of your Salesforce setup, leading to a better return on investment. This process ensures your Salesforce instance aligns with your business objectives and supports your growth.

The scope and duration of a Salesforce audit can vary significantly. Some audits may be straightforward, requiring only a few days to complete, while others may involve a more in-depth examination spanning several weeks or even months.

The ultimate goal of a Salesforce audit remains the same: to provide a comprehensive evaluation of your Salesforce instance and identify opportunities for improvement.

To determine the scope of your audit, consider the following factors:

• The size and complexity of your organization
• The specific challenges or pain points you’re experiencing with your Salesforce instance
• The level of customization and integration within your Salesforce environment
• The frequency and depth of previous audits

Essential Monitoring Tools for Your Audit

Salesforce provides a robust suite of native tools designed to streamline the audit process and maintain system health. Understanding these tools proves essential for conducting thorough, efficient audits. Here are the key resources at your disposal:

• Salesforce Optimizer analyzes your instance to provide detailed insights about feature usage and performance optimization, helping identify areas for improvement
• Security Health Check assesses your settings against Salesforce’s baseline standards and recommends specific security enhancements
• Field Audit Trail monitors changes to specific fields, ensuring compliance and data integrity across your org
• Login History and Event Monitoring tracks user activity and helps identify unauthorized access attempts before they become security incidents

Additional tools that prove invaluable during audits include:

• Duplicate Management Tools for maintaining clean, accurate records
• Apex Exception Emails and Debug Logs for troubleshooting custom code issues
• Reports and Dashboards for measuring system performance metrics
• Schema Builder for visualizing object relationships and field usage
• Change Data Capture (CDC) for monitoring real-time data changes
• Salesforce Shield for advanced security and compliance monitoring

Anatomy of a Successful Audit

Your Salesforce instance is only as strong as its weakest link. Whether it’s a security vulnerability, a data quality issue, or a process inefficiency, even small problems can have far-reaching consequences. To mitigate these risks, organizations must adopt a proactive approach to system maintenance, starting with regular, comprehensive audits.

Phase 1: Initial Planning and Scope Definition

Success in any Salesforce audit begins with meticulous preparation. The initial planning and scope definition phase lays the groundwork for a comprehensive evaluation, ensuring that all critical aspects of your Salesforce implementation are addressed. During this stage, define the audit’s objectives, scope, and timeline, and identify the key stakeholders who will be involved in the process.

Key Goals:

• Ensure compliance with industry regulations
• Assess potential security risks
• Optimize system performance

Key Activities:

• Establish Realistic Timelines: Create a project timeline that accounts for your organization’s size and complexity.
• Identify Key Stakeholders: Engage with system administrators, department heads, and end users to ensure their insights and expertise are incorporated into the audit process.

Phase 2: Information Gathering and Discovery

With your audit scope defined, the next phase involves gathering detailed information about your current Salesforce configuration. This requires a thorough examination of your system’s documentation, configuration, and workflows, as well as engagement with key stakeholders.

System Documentation Review

A comprehensive review of your system’s documentation is essential to understanding your current configuration. This includes:

• Examining existing configurations and metadata
• Analyzing current automation rules and workflows
• Reviewing integration points with other systems

Stakeholder Engagement

Engaging with key team members is crucial to gaining a deeper understanding of your organization’s daily operations and challenges. Through interviews and discussions, you can:

• Identify undocumented workarounds and process inefficiencies
• Understand feature adoption challenges and training gaps
• Gather valuable insights from system administrators, department heads, and end users

Phase 3: Core Assessment Activities

Now that you have a solid understanding of your Salesforce system, it’s time to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of your configuration, data quality, and security posture. This phase will help you identify areas for optimization, improvement, and potential risk.

Security Evaluation

Ensuring the security and integrity of your Salesforce instance is paramount. An in-depth security assessment is essential to identifying potential vulnerabilities and protecting sensitive data. This involves examining user profiles, permission structures, and authentication methods to ensure that access is properly controlled and data is secure.

Key Areas to Focus On:

• Field-level security settings: Confirm that sensitive data is properly secured.
• Role hierarchy alignment: Verify that user roles are correctly aligned with business needs.
• Login IP restrictions: Assess the effectiveness of login IP restrictions in preventing unauthorized access.
• Authentication protocols: Evaluate the security of authentication protocols used to access your Salesforce instance.

Data Quality Review

Data quality has a direct impact on your organization’s ability to make informed decisions. Your assessment should examine the accuracy and completeness of CRM data, evaluating how well it aligns with business needs. Some key considerations include:

• Data accuracy and completeness
• Data alignment with business needs
• Duplicate or problematic records
• Data retention policies

Effective data management is essential for business success. Identifying opportunities to improve data quality enhances decision-making and overall performance.

System Configuration Analysis

A thorough examination of your technical implementation is necessary to identify areas for optimization. This involves evaluating custom code, automation rules, and integration points. Focus on the following key activities:

• Custom Code Review: Inspect all custom code against Salesforce best practices to ensure efficiency and maintainability.
• Automation Assessment: Evaluate the effectiveness of workflow rules, process builders, flow configurations, and Apex triggers.
• Integration Evaluation: Analyze connections with other business systems to identify performance bottlenecks or security vulnerabilities.
• Custom Object Review: Assess custom objects and fields for optimization opportunities to improve data quality and system performance.

This analysis helps streamline processes, improve efficiency, and reduce risk. A well-optimized system configuration unlocks the full potential of your Salesforce implementation.

Documentation and Next Steps

With the audit complete, the real work begins – transforming insights into impact. This final step centers on synthesizing findings, crafting tailored recommendations, and sharing results with stakeholders to drive lasting improvements and elevate the performance of your Salesforce organization.

Key Deliverables

• Audit Report: A detailed document outlining your findings, recommendations, and proposed actions.
• Executive Summary: A high-level overview of the audit’s key findings and recommendations, designed for stakeholders and executives.
• Action Plan: A prioritized list of tasks and recommendations for implementing changes and addressing identified issues.

Key Activities

• Compile and Analyze Findings: Gather data and observations from the audit, and analyze them to identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement.
• Develop Recommendations: Based on your findings, develop actionable recommendations for addressing identified issues and improving your Salesforce implementation.
• Present Findings and Recommendations: Share your audit report, executive summary, and action plan with relevant stakeholders, and collaborate with them to develop a plan for implementing changes.

How Decision Foundry Can Enhance Your Salesforce Audit

Salesforce maintenance often falls by the wayside amid competing priorities. However, neglecting regular audits can gradually lead to inefficiencies, security risks, and data quality issues, undermining the benefits your CRM system should provide. Adopting a proactive approach ensures that your Salesforce instance remains a powerful, reliable tool for driving growth and success.

A Salesforce audit is an ongoing process of continuous improvement, not a one-time event. Establishing a regular cadence of audits and acting on their recommendations helps maintain a clean, efficient, and secure system that evolves with your business. The effort invested today will pay dividends for years to come, enabling your team to work smarter, make better decisions, and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

At Decision Foundry, we bring extensive expertise across the Salesforce Ecosystem to support you in this process. Our team of highly qualified local professionals is ready to assist with your Salesforce Audit, providing comprehensive reports that clearly outline the next steps to optimize your environment. Specialists will walk you through the findings, differentiating between critical and non-critical issues to help you prioritize your actions. Reach out to us today to explore how we can support your needs!