12 Signs Your Salesforce Org Needs a Health Check
Slow changes, untrusted reports, spreadsheet workarounds. Twelve warning signs of Salesforce technical debt — and what to check for each one.
Most Salesforce orgs don't fail. They slow down. Every year adds a few fields, a few flows, a few permission exceptions — each one reasonable at the time. Eventually small changes take weeks, and nobody is quite sure what will break.
That's technical debt, and it's normal. The question is whether it's costing you more than it would cost to fix. Here are twelve warning signs, grouped by how they show up, and what to check for each one.
Signs your users are working around Salesforce
1. Reports start arguments instead of ending them
When the pipeline report is debated in every meeting, the problem is rarely the report. It's usually duplicate records, inconsistent stages, or fields that mean different things to different teams.
What to check: duplicate and matching rules, required fields per stage, and how many records sit in "Other" picklist values.
2. Spreadsheets run the real process
If the team exports to Excel to plan, approve or hand off work, Salesforce is storing the result — not running the process.
What to check: which steps happen outside Salesforce, and why. The answer is usually a missing status, owner or approval step.
3. Work moves through email and chat, not the record
"I'll Slack you when it's done" means there's no status field, queue or notification doing that job.
4. Users don't trust their own page layouts
Pages with 150 fields, half of them unused, push people toward the few fields they recognise — and data quality drops.
What to check: field usage (how many records actually have a value) and page layouts per profile or Lightning record page.
Signs the org is hard to change
5. Small changes take weeks
If adding a field requires checking five flows, three validation rules and an integration, the org is telling you its dependencies aren't documented.
6. There are areas nobody wants to touch
Every older org has a "don't go in there" object. That's where undocumented automation and custom code tend to live.
7. Legacy automation is still running
Workflow Rules and Process Builder reached end of support on December 31, 2025. If they still run alongside newer flows, the order and interaction of automation becomes hard to predict. See our migration guide.
8. Releases break things
If each seasonal Salesforce release or internal deployment brings surprise errors, testing and deployment practice — not just configuration — needs attention.
Signs of risk you can't see day to day
9. Too many people can see (or edit) too much
Permissions granted one exception at a time add up. Profiles with "Modify All Data," shared admin logins and inactive users who still hold licenses are common findings.
What to check: run Salesforce's built-in Health Check in Setup for security settings, then review who holds powerful permissions and why.
10. Integrations need manual fixes
If someone re-runs a sync or fixes records by hand every week, the integration's ownership rules or error handling aren't defined. Every integration needs clear answers to three questions: which system owns the data, which direction it moves, and what happens when it fails.
11. Performance complaints are growing
Slow record saves often come from too much automation firing on one object. Slow reports often come from large data volumes without archiving or selective filters.
12. Admins firefight instead of improving
When most of the admin team's time goes to fixing issues and answering "why did this happen?", there's no capacity left to improve the org.
How many signs is too many?
- 1–3 signs: normal for a growing org. Fix them as part of regular admin work.
- 4–7 signs: debt is slowing the business. A structured review will pay for itself in faster changes.
- 8 or more: changes are becoming risky. Assess before you build anything major — especially before adding AI agents, which act on the same data and automation.
What a Salesforce health check covers
A good health check looks at the org as it's actually built and used, not as it was designed:
| Area | What's reviewed |
|---|---|
| Architecture | Data model, record types, custom objects |
| Data | Duplicates, completeness, ownership |
| Automation | Flow inventory, legacy automation, order of execution |
| Security | Profiles, permission sets, sharing, Health Check score |
| Integrations | Data ownership, direction, error handling |
| User experience | Page layouts, field usage, adoption |
| Reporting | Trust in key reports and dashboards |
| Technical debt | Unused fields, inactive automation, old code |
Salesforce's built-in security Health Check (in Setup) is a useful free first pass for security settings. Tools like it show configuration issues; they can't tell you whether the org fits how your business actually works.
Next step
If you recognised several of these signs, start with an assessment. Our Salesforce org assessment looks at how your org is built and how it's used before anything changes, across these same areas, with the scope agreed with you up front. It's the natural starting point for Salesforce optimization work.