It's officially springtime here in New York… so it's time for some spring cleaning!
As the admin of your PatronManager account, you're probably pretty busy most of the time, creating reports, refining processes, answering questions for your users… there's plenty to do. Outside of those day-to-day things, though, there are lots of other tasks that don't need your constant attention but still shouldn't be forgotten about forever. In this series of three posts, we'll make some suggestions for tasks you might include in a quarterly cleanup of your Salesforce account.
Data cleanup
Time for some more decluttering! Last week we talked about how to clean up templates and reports in your account; this week we'll move on to cleaning up your data itself. Bad data is worse than no data, so you'll want to make sure you're giving these things attention as part of your quarterly checklist.
1) Deduping!
If you've got your users following best practices at least MOST of the time (searching for accounts/contacts before creating new ones, and regularly qualifying ticket orders/donations/signups if you're using PatronManager), you might have some duplicate records that snuck their way in to your account, but you probably don't have tons and tons of them.
Still, it only takes one or two encounters with duplicate data for your users to feel confused and disgruntled. You might be hearing complaints from your colleagues who are more directly involved in data entry or reporting.
A good way to start understanding the scope of your (possible) problem is by running a report -- a simple All Contacts report, grouped by Full Name or by Email and then sorted by Record Count descending will let you just spot check to get an overall sense of the quality of your data. Any grouping that has more than one record is worth investigating as a possible dupe. You might notice hundreds and hundreds of problem records right away, or you might just catch one or two.
i think we have a problem
From there, you can decide how to address the problem. Merge the one or two dupes that you found and move on, or call in the big guns and use a tool that will help you tackle a larger set. We use DemandTools when we're helping our clients; you might prefer something a little more lightweight like Cloudingo if you're doing this yourself.
2) Field audit!
Look, we're pretty sure about this one: You have fields that aren't being used enough to justify their existence. Account, Contact, and Opportunity/Donation tend to be the worst offenders. Either you created a bunch of fields a long time ago with the best of intentions but they turned out not to actually be important to your business, or you created one-time-use fields specifically to get through a particular project, but never actually nuked the field after you were done using it.
Time to clean those up!
The Field Trip app is the fastest and easiest way to identify these fields where you don't have good usable data. This tool can be used to analyze your entire database or just certain segments of it, and it will tell you what percentage of records have values in each field for that object.
field trip!
Then call a meeting with your colleagues and get their buy-in about proceeding with the cleanup. One good way to ease people into the idea of parting with a field they might think is still important: Start by removing it from page layouts, then hide it with field-level security. Give your colleagues some time to get used to not having the field around, and if you can get through til the next quarter without ever needing the field, go ahead and get rid of it. (This is basically this "outbox" concept, just with fields instead of stuff in your home!)
We've called this series of posts "spring cleaning," but make it a habit! Each quarter, take a day or two to run through all the items in each of these three posts. (In fact, go right now and schedule this in your calendar for each quarter! You'll thank yourself later when your Salesforce account is sparklingly clean and organized.)