Is your Salesforce org cluttered with underutilized fields that are slowing down your team?

In this video, Malik Satia from Cloud Adoption Solutions walks you through the essential process of field utilization analysis and retirement. As an org grows, it’s common to build up a backlog of fields that take up space without adding value, but knowing which ones are safe to delete is the real challenge.

Cleaning up your org isn’t just about deleting data; it’s about increasing efficiency for your end users and making your page layouts easier to navigate. By identifying fields with low population rates that have been in your system for over a year, you can strategically deprecate “ghost fields” and keep your Salesforce instance running lean and fast.

Watch now to learn the best practices for maintaining a clean, high-performing Salesforce environment!

Let us know if you have any questions or if you have any requests for our next CAS Come and See Video!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hello everyone. Welcome back to another video with Cloud Adoption Solutions. My name is Malik, and today we’re going to be going over field utilization and field retirement—or deprecation, whatever you want to call it.

This is something that every Salesforce administrator deals with during the setup and maintenance of their Salesforce org. You often run into fields that you need to get rid of because, over time, you build up so many fields from creating new things without deprecating old ones at the right time. This leads to a backlog of underutilized fields that take up space and aren’t being used.

Today, we’re going to go over a tool you can use to help identify fields to clean up, how to identify the correct fields for removal, and the best way to go about cleaning them up.

As you can see on my screen, I have Field Spy open. Field Spy is similar to Field Trip, if you have heard of that tool before. There are other tools I use, such as Elements Cloud, and a third that most people use—Salesforce Optimizer. However, Optimizer is actually being scheduled for retirement, so it’s best to use a tool that will be around for a while to help analyze your field usage. I recommend Field Spy; it’s available on the AppExchange, and it’s free.

Field Spy analyzes the fields on an object and compares them against the records to show the ‘population’—or how many of those records actually have those specific fields filled out. To use it, you select the object you want to analyze from the list and add it to the Object Analyzer. You can run the analysis immediately or schedule it to run every week or every six months so you can stay on top of your fields as you continue development.

Once the analysis runs, you get a view of the field utilization. Field Spy tells you if it is a custom field or a standard field and the percentage of records that have that field filled out. For example, on my Opportunities, I might see that only 82% of the Account IDs are filled out, while a Campaign ID field might show 0%. You can also identify ‘weird’ things that were never cleaned up, such as duplicate lookup fields created during testing.

A great way to further analyze this is to export the data into a CSV and upload it into Google Sheets or Excel. Once imported, you can highlight the specific fields you believe should be removed.

When you are ready to delete, you can find the fields in Setup under the specific object. It is important to note that you cannot delete standard fields (those without the ‘_c’ suffix).

Before you click delete, always use the ‘Where is it used?’ button. For instance, I found a field I thought was unused, but the ‘Where is it used?’ tool showed it was being utilized in a Stage Tracker Flow. In that case, I’d leave the field alone. However, if a field is only used in a layout or a report type, those won’t prevent the field from being deleted.

When you delete a field, Salesforce moves it to a ‘Deleted Fields’ area. You have 15 days to undo any deletions before Salesforce removes the field permanently. If you undelete it within that window, Salesforce will restore the data that was in that field.

Here are three crucial things to take into account when deleting fields:

1. Check where the fields are being used: Ensure they aren’t tied to automation, Apex classes, or email templates. Even if a field isn’t on a page layout, it may be active on the backend.

2. Check the ‘Created Date’: Newer fields will naturally have lower population percentages. You generally only want to delete fields that have been around for over a year and still show a very low population.

3. Know your processes: Some fields aren’t meant to be filled out every time. For example, an ‘Expedited’ checkbox should only be checked for specific scenarios. Its population will be low because not every record should be expedited.

By using these tools and strategies, you can keep the clutter in your org low. As an admin or an end-user, seeing a page layout cluttered with irrelevant fields slows down efficiency. Keeping your org lean helps your users stay productive.

Thank you guys so much for watching. Feel free to reach out to Cloud Adoption Solutions for any of your Salesforce needs, and we will talk to you next time. Bye!