Learning Spotlight

How can unused fields negatively impact your teams and data?

One of the most common themes that we see with any team or organization we work with is blank, unused fields on multiple objects. It’s an easy problem to ignore because it doesn’t have any easily visible impact. In this month's Info and Education Spotlight, I’m going to try to make the case for why you should care about them and a few strategies to address blank, unused fields.

Why should you care?

Blank fields are more than just empty space that you and most, if not all, of the organization ignore, they are decreasing the optimization and implementation of your data.

When your Salesforce instance has fields, that aren't needed or no longer used, they have more of a negative impact than you think. I will give you a couple of examples.

• Unused and unneeded fields take up space on the page layout, which increases the time you and your team have to scroll to find what you are looking for or to enter the data you need.
• The impact can be harmful. It can cause individuals to get into bad habits of scrolling quickly past fields, which can cause them to miss things they should complete or enter data into the correct field.

• Unused and Blank fields make it more difficult to find the fields you need or want in reports, and selecting the wrong field for a report or dashboard can cause unnecessary confusion or bad reporting.
• Your team will lose precious time. They may spend more time trying to make sense of data that they will never be able to or rely on data for decision-making that does not reflect the actual result.

What to do about it?

The concern with removing empty fields is that they may be used in a report or process that you are unaware of and will cause a cascading failure if they are deleted or removed. There are two strategies we employ and recommend when cleaning up fields in Salesforce. First, use a meta data analysis tool (our partner's tool/Elements Cloud) to assess the data and usage of fields quickly and easily in Salesforce, no matter how complex the setup.

Second, once you identify the fields you need to remove, do not delete them right away. Remove the fields from page layouts and hide them from user view. Wait 3–4 weeks to see if anyone in your organization reports any issue in case fields are missing. During this period, if you have not used the meta data analysis tool, you need to make sure the fields are not used in any key reports or dashboards. If there are no issues reported, then you can delete them.

If you are interested, in optimizing your page layout, and need any assistance let us know we'd love to help.