Conducting a Salesforce Audit

What is a Salesforce Audit?

Salesforce is a powerful customer relationship management (CRM) tool that can help businesses streamline their sales and marketing efforts. However, as with any complex system, it's important to periodically review your Salesforce implementation to ensure that it's still meeting your needs and that you're getting the most out of it. That's where a Salesforce audit comes in.

A Salesforce audit is basically a review of your current system setup and configuration. It's an opportunity to take a closer look at how you're using Salesforce and identify any areas where you could be doing things better. Audits can be conducted by an external Consultant or by someone within your own organization.

Benefits of a Salesforce Audit by Features

First, it can help you to identify any gaps in your current implementation. This is especially helpful if you've made any recent changes to your system or if you've added new users who may be unfamiliar with how things are supposed to work. Second, an audit can help you to fine-tune your system for better performance. And finally, an audit can give you peace of mind, knowing that your Salesforce system is running as efficiently and effectively as possible.

1. Reports and Dashboards: A Salesforce audit can help optimize your reporting capabilities by identifying underutilized reports and dashboards, improving data accuracy and consistency, and aligning them with your key performance indicators (KPIs). This allows you to track and measure important metrics effectively.‍
2. Workflow and Process Automation: Auditing workflows and process automation helps streamline business processes by identifying redundant or unnecessary steps, optimizing approval processes, and automating repetitive tasks. This leads to increased productivity, reduced manual effort, and improved operational efficiency.
3. Data Validation and Cleansing: A Salesforce audit allows you to review data validation rules and data cleansing processes. You can identify and rectify data quality issues, such as incomplete or outdated records, ensuring that your data is reliable, consistent, and up to date.
4. Custom Objects and Fields: Assessing custom objects and fields helps you optimize your Salesforce instance by identifying unused or redundant elements. By removing unnecessary customizations and organizing fields effectively, you can simplify data entry, improve user experience, and optimize system performance.
5. User Permissions and Access Controls: An audit helps ensure that user permissions and access controls are properly configured and aligned with your organization's security policies. You can review user roles, profiles, and permission sets to prevent unauthorized access and ensure data security.
6. AppExchange Apps and Integrations: Evaluating AppExchange apps and integrations allows you to assess their relevance, usage, and effectiveness. By identifying unused or outdated apps and reviewing integration efficiency, you can optimize your tech stack, streamline data exchange, and improve overall system performance.
7. Mobile and Lightning Experience: Auditing the mobile and Lightning Experience aspects of Salesforce helps ensure that your platform is optimized for different devices and provides a seamless user experience. You can identify areas for improvement, such as optimizing page layouts, implementing mobile-specific features, and enhancing user navigation.
8. Data Backup and Recovery: A Salesforce audit enables you to review your data backup and recovery processes. You can ensure that data is regularly backed up, assess recovery time objectives, and validate the effectiveness of your disaster recovery plans. This helps protect your data from loss or corruption and ensures business continuity.

Deciding if your company needs a Salesforce Audit

There are a few clear signs that it might be time for your company to invest in a Salesforce audit.

First, if you've been using Salesforce for awhile but feel like you're not making the most of its features, an audit can help you identify areas of improvement. Second, if you're experiencing inaccurate data reports, an audit can help you determine the root cause of the problem. Finally, if your users regularly report bugs in the system, workflow automations aren't performing the desired actions, or integrations to other systems aren't working properly, an audit can give you a fresh perspective on how to optimize your use of the platform.

Ultimately, a Salesforce audit can be a valuable tool for any company that wants to ensure that it's getting the most out of its investment in the platform.

How to Conduct a Salesforce Audit

While this process can be conducted internally by your team or with an external Consultant, it requires significant knowledge of the Salesforce platform and features available so be certain you have a Subject Matter Expert in-house if that's your plan.

The goal of a Salesforce audit is to identify any areas where improvements can be made in order to optimize the use of Salesforce within your organization.

There are several steps basic steps to get started with a thorough Salesforce audit.

First, you will want to gather all documentation, including the Salesforce Org structure, field mappings, data model, etc.

Next, you will want to review all existing processes and configuration settings within the Salesforce Org. More on the technical specifics below.

Once you have a good understanding of how the system is currently being used, you can then begin to identify any areas where improvements can be made. Finally, you will want to create a report detailing your findings and recommendations. This report can then be used as a roadmap for the changes you plan to make in the future, providing a thorough list of projects, timelines, and estimates.
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Follow this step by step Salesforce audit checklist:

1. Define Audit Objectives

Determine the specific goals and objectives of the audit. Identify the areas you want to assess, such as data quality, security, customization, or process efficiency. This will provide clarity and direction throughout the audit process.

2. Gather Stakeholder Input

Engage relevant stakeholders, including Salesforce administrators, users, and management, to gather their feedback and insights. Understand their pain points, challenges, and expectations to tailor the audit accordingly.

3. Evaluate Data Quality

Analyze the quality and accuracy of your Salesforce data. Identify and resolve issues such as duplicate records, incomplete information, or inconsistent formatting. Use data validation rules and data cleansing techniques to improve data quality.

4. Review Customizations and Configurations

Analyze custom objects, fields, workflows, process automation, and other customizations in your Salesforce instance. Identify unused or redundant elements and assess their effectiveness in supporting your business processes. Evaluate whether the configurations align with best practices and optimize them accordingly.

5. Analyze Reports and Dashboards

Review existing reports and dashboards to assess their relevance and effectiveness. Identify underutilized or outdated reports and optimize them to align with your KPIs and reporting needs. Ensure that the data presented is accurate and meaningful for decision-making.

6. Evaluate Integration and AppExchange Apps

Assess integrations with other systems and evaluate the efficiency of data exchange. Review the relevance and usage of AppExchange apps and assess their impact on system performance and user experience. Remove unused or unnecessary integrations and apps, and optimize the remaining ones.

7. Document Findings and Recommendations

Document the findings, issues, and recommendations identified during the audit process. Include actionable steps and prioritize them based on their impact and urgency. This will serve as a roadmap for implementing the necessary changes and improvements.

Top Monitoring Tools for a Salesforce Audit

Salesforce Health Check

It provides a score to measure how well your current security settings meet the baseline standards set by Salesforce.

Lightning App Usage

Available in production orgs, this allows Administrators monitor adoption and utilization metrics, such as daily active users (DAUs), active licenses, most visited pages, and more. This is a critical tool to understand how Salesforce is actually being used internally and should be paired with qualitative user interviews as part of a thorough audit.

Portal Health Check

If your company is using Communities (Experience Cloud) to connect with external B2B or B2C users, it's critical that you run a portal health check to monitor access points and security-related protocols.

Apex Exception Email

This is a critical component to monitoring your technical debt on a periodic basis. These serve as notifications to monitor when an Apex class or trigger exceeds 50% of an Apex governor limit or when an unhandled exception occurs in a trigger or class.

API Usage Notifications

Keeping tabs on the usage limits for API requests is important to maintaining best practices and ensuring there are no outages or lost data syncs with 3rd party tools you have integrated to Salesforce. Particularly for growing startups with a number of unmanaged applications integrated with Salesforce, you will want to monitor these limits.

Duplicate Error Logs

As a general best practices for data hygiene and general usability of your Salesforce tool, you want to conduct these reports on a periodic basis and devise a strategy for de-duplication.

Flow Debug Tool

As companies move away from process builder and flows continue to take over as the primary way to enhance Salesforce functionality, you want to monitor performance and debug regularly. Especially as we see orgs migrate legacy Apex code into automations powered by flows, this regularly maintenance is important to ensure best practices.

Salesforce Audit Checklist

While a Salesforce audit is dependent on the size and complexity of an org (as well as the actual Salesforce products implemented), here is a general checklist you can follow when conducting one.

Start with business process documentation

Before diving into the actual application, a Salesforce Consultant will need to conduct a very quick business process review to document the primary workflow of the teams actually leveraging the product. This can often be done through a couple user interviews and a session with stakeholders.

Org Security Check and Salesforce Optimizer

These are out-of-the-box tools that an Administrator or Consultant can initiate within the org. Start with running these tools within Salesforce to get the basic metrics that will inform on areas of the platform that should be evaluated in more detail as you undergo the audit.

User / License Utilization

Another step that involves out-of-the-box tools available in Salesforce, this will provide metrics on usage data, daily users, data volumes being added to Salesforce, and more that helps understand where a company might be spending for licenses that aren't leveraged. (It's also an important component in looking at user privileges and standardizing your permission sets.)

Assessment of Automations

Run through general items like the Apex error e-mails, default workflow rules, and current settings to form a general understanding of what has been implemented. Documentation of Workflows, Process Builder, Flows, and Apex code is the most involved step of a Salesforce audit and details the specific functionality that has been deployed, how the automations are triggered, where best practices have been followed, current issues or bugs in the build, and overall data flow.

Health Check on Objects

A look at the architecture and utilization of standard and custom objects to better document and diagnose the relationship automations have throughout your entire Salesforce org. This is often where architecture standards have a lot of area to improve so this diagnostic phase will often result in high-impact projects that could be approached as part of an optimization effort.

Need Help With Your Salesforce Audit?

If you are a startup or mid-sized Salesforce Customer, a thorough audit shouldn't take more than ~20 hours of work by a Salesforce Consultant or Sr. Salesforce Administrator.

The finished product of this audit should provide a general assessment of your org's health across all categories detailed above.

Engaging with FoundHQ for a Salesforce Audit looks like this:

1. You tell us about the general state of your Salesforce stance and what you're after.

2. We gather 2-3 independent, pre-vetted Consultants from our network of over 3,000 experts.

3. You interview one or all the candidates and pick the one you want to engage with.

It's that easy.

• No rigid SOWs.
• No recruiting fees.
• No time-commitments.

Schedule a call here.