Some point, with heavy use, many admins, and a lack of regular maintenance, your Salesforce org will start hitting limits. Limits include those found in System Overview, but in this article, we will address field and value limits – specifically, how to avoid hitting them.
We will cover how to do it yourself with tools that are already at your disposal. This process can be time-consuming, but if done methodically, it is doable and will result in a longer, more flexible life for your org.
Become a Metadata Management Pro
If you have inherited an old, messy org, you may find yourself hitting up against field limits and even the 300 value limit on controlling picklists. Even if you aren’t anywhere close to hitting these limits, it’s still best practice to perform regular evaluation of field and value usage to keep your org tidy. Below, I outline the steps and tools to clean up your fields and picklist values, which will indirectly clean up your org and give you more room to add new fields as business needs arise.
Steps to Delete Fields
1. Identify Candidate Fields for Deletion
Tools like Field Trip or Cuneiform are built to identify fields that have been populated on very few records. While Field Trip is no longer available on the AppExchange, if you already installed it in your org, you may continue using it. If you don’t have Field Trip, Cuneiform has a free version available to install.
If you don’t already have a Field Trip and you don’t want to use Cuneiform, you’ll have to really roll your sleeves up.
I recommend starting by identifying 10 to 20 fields that you suspect are not being used. Maybe they were created years ago, maybe you’ve run enough reports to know that certain fields are always empty, or maybe a user told you that they “never use that field”.
Of course, if you’re so audacious or you aren’t sure where to start, you can run a report on all fields. Once you have your list of potentially deletable fields, use Salesforce’s built-in Report tool to analyze field usage. Depending on how old your org is and what your business requirements are, you might consider adding a date filter to the report.
Once you’ve created your report, export it to analyze in Excel.
In Excel, you can use the basic filters to determine which fields have zero entries, which have very few, and which have the same value repeated. These fields will be the ones to consider for deletion.
A few guiding questions to ask stakeholders when determining which fields to consider for deletion include:
- If a field hasn’t been populated for X-number of years, is it okay to delete?
- If a field has been populated fewer than X-number of times, is it okay to delete?
- If a field has the same value on every single record, is it okay to delete?
Determining when a field was last populated can be tricky, especially if you aren’t tracking history on that field. Typically, you can use the Created Date on the record – this will at least give you a ballpark estimate for the date that the field was populated. This is certainly a caveat that you would want to make sure to communicate clearly to your stakeholders.
2. Add Information with the ‘Where Is This Used’ Button in Setup
It is understandable if your stakeholders are particularly concerned with the idea of deleting metadata and its associated data. Often, the more information you provide them with, the more comfortable they will be with moving forward with destructive changes.
Once you identify the fields that you would like to delete, I recommend creating a new spreadsheet with the following columns:
- Field label
- Field name
- Data Type
- Created Date
- Last Modified Date
- Validation Rules
- Layouts
- Lightning pages
- Flows
- Email templates
- Apex code
This list of information is accessible in the Object Manager in Setup. Layouts, flows, email templates, and Apex code, among others, will all be listed by clicking the Where Is This Used? button.
This information will come in handy when it comes time to delete any of the approved fields, as you will need to first remove the field from those configurations before the system will allow you to delete it.
If your stakeholders are particularly curious or nervous and you need additional information about why a field was added, consult your backlog if the admin who made the change is no longer with the company.
3. Determine Which Fields to Delete
Once all stakeholders agree that the fields you’ve identified can be deleted from the system, you are ready to do so efficiently, thanks to all the investigative work you’ve already carried out.
Simply remove the fields from any validation rules, Apex, flows, page layouts, or email templates, etc., and then delete the fields from your org and enjoy a cleaner, more agile object!
Read More: iBirds Services
Steps to Delete Picklist Values
Analyzing picklist values is trickier than analyzing fields. Picklist values don’t have a Where Is This Used? button, for example, so it’s difficult to know if they are referenced in validation rules or flows. However, unlike fields, you can make picklist values inactive rather than hard deleting them, so it provides a bit of safety in case something goes wrong.
This process is similar to homing in on fields to delete with slight variations. First, copy your picklist values from Setup and paste them into an Excel document.
In Excel, you can search for similar or repeated values that could be combined. For example, seven values might be combined into three.
You will also want to run a report on the picklist field itself to find the number of uses of each value. Similar to the report you ran to analyze fields, you may or may not want to filter by Created Date. Like field usage analysis, including Created Date in the report will clue you into when that value was used, which will help you and your stakeholders decide if that value is no longer being utilized by the business.
One thing to keep in mind with this report, however, is that it will not include values that have been used zero times, so exporting this Salesforce report and using a VLOOKUP to combine with the values analysis report that you copied and pasted from Salesforce into Excel would reveal which values have been used zero times.
Taking these steps should help you identify which values to propose to stakeholders to make inactive.
Summary
While there are increasingly more tools to help with metadata analysis and tech debt, they may be expensive, or if they utilize AI, your employer might not yet be ready to adopt such technology, depending on your industry or security risks and responsibilities.
As demonstrated, with a little time and elbow grease, you can significantly clean up unnecessarily cluttered objects’ fields and picklists’ value lists. Due to the interdependent nature of fields and picklist values, cleaning up this metadata will inevitably clean up other components in your org as well.
The cleaner your org, the more agile your response to business needs will be, and the longer your org will serve your company.
FAQs
Q1: What is metadata in Salesforce?
A: Metadata is the structure of your Salesforce org, like fields, picklists, layouts, and rules.
Q2: Why clean Salesforce fields?
A: Cleaning unused fields saves space, reduces errors, and makes your org more flexible.
Q3: Can I delete picklist values directly?
A: Not always. You can make unused picklist values inactive to avoid breaking existing processes.
Q4: What tools help identify unused fields?
A: Tools like Field Trip or Cuneiform can help. Otherwise, you can analyze Salesforce reports manually.Q5: How often should I clean my org?
A: Regular reviews every 6–12 months help keep your org organized and efficient.