Salesforce Activity Object: How to Navigate Field Limit Constraints

Being a leader in customer relationship management (CRM) systems, Salesforce offers extensive customization capabilities. However, it comes with restrictions, one of which includes the stringent limits on the number of custom fields that can be added to each object. This instance includes the Activity Object, which is essential for managing tasks and events. As organizations grow, their data requirements become more complex, pushing the limits of Salesforce’s built-in constraints.

This article discusses the problems and effects of field limit restrictions on Salesforce’s Activity Object. It also suggests effective ways to resolve these problems, like checking fields, making custom objects, and using Salesforce Big Objects. These best practices can help organizations optimize system performance and scalability while maintaining a structured CRM environment.

The Role of the Activity Object

The Activity Object in Salesforce is responsible for recording, tracking, and managing customer interactions. It is crucial for sales, marketing, and customer service functions, ensuring a complete history of engagements. However, with a limit of 100 custom fields (now 300, thanks to the Spring ‘25 release), larger organizations may struggle to scale their CRM system efficiently.

Challenges of Field Limit Constraints in Salesforce

Salesforce enforces field limits to ensure optimal performance and prevent excessive data storage from impacting the system. Given Salesforce’s multi-tenant architecture, these limits help maintain overall system efficiency while encouraging organizations to store only essential data.

Organizations that heavily rely on the Activity Object may face several challenges due to field constraints:

• Data Fragmentation: When limits are reached, teams may resort to storing critical information outside Salesforce, leading to inefficiencies.
• Customization Overhead: Workarounds, such as creating additional custom objects, can complicate system architecture.
• Operational Delays: Reviewing and deleting existing fields to accommodate new ones can slow business processes.

Navigating Field Limit Challenges at a Technology Company

Context and Initial Challenge

While working in the CRM team at a major tech company, we encountered a significant obstacle. We needed to incorporate a crucial new field into the Salesforce Activity object, which already had 95 customizable fields (excluding system-default fields). This was before the Spring ‘25 release, when the limit was still at 100. The addition was important in helping us become more effective in tracking and engaging customers in line with our business goals.

Methodology for Field Audit

I led an audit of the field usage of the Activity object, reeling from the shock of not knowing until now the implications of being unable to escape from it. The audit process involved:

• Data Collection: We collected and analyzed extensive usage data for all existing fields to evaluate their utilization rates over a considerable period. This helped us show metrics whether some field was accessed or updated by which connections and when
• Stakeholder Engagement: I scheduled multiple meetings with sales, marketing, and customer support stakeholders to evaluate the business impact of each field. Working together mitigated the risk that any decisions they made would hinder day-to-day business operations and impede critical business functions.

Audit Findings

The field usage audit provided clear insights:

• Underutilized Fields: We identified about ten rarely used fields that had become obsolete due to changes in our business operations. These fields were either no longer relevant or duplicated information available elsewhere in our CRM ecosystem.
• Redundant Data: The first opportunity to remove redundant data was to identify the data columns where the same fields stored the same information and could be accessed via other connected Salesforce objects or integrated systems.

Decision-Making Process and Actions Taken

According to the audit results, I spearheaded decision-making, which included the following solutions:

• Field Deprecation Plan: We drafted a plan for deprecating the underutilized and redundant fields identified. The document outlined a phased removal plan to lessen the impact on users and give them time to adapt to the changes.
• Creation of a Custom Object: The added fields exceed the future field limit. We thought about creating a custom object to avoid hitting the future field limit and storing some additional fields for our work. We primarily designed this to accommodate less-critical fields, which are still important for broader business processes but less so for daily functions.

Outcomes and Impact

The results of this strategic venture were highly favorable:

• Improved System Performance: Removing unnecessary fields on the Activity object not only decluttered the layout but also positively impacted system performance.
• Increased Flexibility and Scalability: A custom object for overflow fields equipped our CRM system with agility power, allowing us to be future-ready without worrying about field capacity limits.
• Proactive Field Management Culture: This has effectively ushered in a culture change on our team with regular audits and a culture of proactive management of Salesforce customizations to drive ongoing efficiencies and ramp up the scalability of our CRM platform.

Analysis

Field Usage Audit

This process of auditing field usage spanning the entire sandbox was a significant step forward for reconciling the limits of the Activity object on Salesforce as we approached the limit. Here’s how we audited the data and analyzed it:

• Data Collection Strategy: Initially, we utilized Salesforce’s pre-packaged reporting and crafted custom scripts to gauge the frequency of field usage (reads+writes) over a 12-month period. This approach gave us a quantitative indicator of which fields were used in day-to-day operations and which were dead codes.
  • Evaluation Criteria: We evaluated each of the fields using a few different criteria.
    • Usage Frequency: How regularly was the field accessed and updated?
    • Business Relevance: The criticality of the domain to current business operations, evaluated via stakeholder interviews.
  • Data Redundancy: Whether the field data would have been duplicated throughout other parts of the Salesforce environment or could have been easily calculated or derived from different data points.
• Stakeholder Feedback: User feedback from different areas was essential. We interviewed and surveyed the qualitative feedback for the significance of specific fields so that the findings and values from the audit were in line with the real business needs and user experiences.
• Audit Outcomes: The audit discovered numerous infrequently used fields with a less-used case developed from an evolving business process or system integration. 

This procedure helped optimize quickly changing Activity objects by deciding which fields to keep, which to modify, and which to remove.

Decision to Create a Custom Object

After noticing the constraints of the field capacity and understanding that system efficiency needed to be maintained, the decision was made to build a custom object.

The main reason for creating the custom object was to ease the load from the Activity object by moving fields that were not needed daily for task and event management but were needed in general business use cases. This approach trades off detailed data capture against performance considerations.

Design and Implementation

• Field Selection: Fields selected for migration were determined during the audit as being rare in their use, but were required for compliance, historically, and infrequently needed analysis.
• Custom Object Configuration: The new object was configured to match the essential characteristics of the fields to be moved, preserving the integrity and continuity of the data. Relationships were created between the new custom object and existing Salesforce objects to keep the data connected and ensure reports could run.

Benefits of the Custom Object

• Enhanced Performance: We significantly improved the Activity object by treating non-essential data around Activity as a translucent field.
• Scalability: With the custom object, we could scale without compromising the Activities object, which was designed for efficiency.
• Flexibility: This option provided more flexibility for data and customizations, enabling better tweaks for changing business needs without frequent restructuring.

Solutions and Recommendations

Strategic Field Management

This procedure highlights the importance of practical field management to ensure an optimized Salesforce environment and to avoid any surprises with limits that might hinder operational capabilities. Organizations can implement strategic field management with:

• Regular Audits: Periodic audits of field usage can help you continuously determine the impact and use of fields across all objects. These audits should include:
  • Automated Monitoring Tools: Implement tools that monitor field access and updates to provide insights into which fields are less utilized.
  • Stakeholder Reviews: Regularly meet with users from different departments to obtain feedback and understand how they use your data in the field, ensuring that Salesforce configurations match changing business processes.
  • Actionable Audit Reports: Create actionable audit reports that present usage statistics and articulate recommendations – fields that can be deprecated, combined, or adjusted.

• Field Optimization Workshops: workshops to teach users best practices for data entry and field usage. These sessions may cut out the double data entry and promote better adoption of the Salesforce platform.

Custom Objects for Field Overflow

The process involves getting a little more creative and using custom objects for managing field limits, which is a more strategic way to handle field overflow and still keep CRM architecture clean and healthy.

Recognize the scenarios when standard objects cannot fulfill the business needs and require other objects with custom fields. You should consider custom objects if:

• Data Isolation is Practical: Some data types might not need to be present directly on leading CRM objects but still require some structured storage and accessibility decisions.
• Specific Business Processes: You can use custom objects for business processes or compliance requirements that are not part of your core CRM strategy.
• Design Principles: Have the design of custom objects follow best practices
• Minimal Overlap: Do not duplicate a function or existing data in a standard object.
• Transparent Relationships: What happens when you have both custom and standard objects? Ensure you can report on them transparently and that everything is pulled into the right place.
• User-Friendly Design: Arrange custom objects in a way that is easy for end-users to consume and use correctly.

Use of Salesforce Big Objects

This solution can be considered by organizations that have large volumes of historical data or extensive analytical needs. Consider using Big Objects depending on:

• Applicability: Big objects will be the best candidates to store extensive data sets that you will not need to access frequently but should keep for compliance, reporting, or analytical purposes.
• Implementation Considerations:
  • Data Archiving Strategy: Implement Big Objects as part of a data archiving strategy to offload old data out of regular CRM objects, which will allow you to keep them lean, healthy, and performant.
  • Verify the efficient use of Big Objects with BI tools to leverage unparalleled analytics on the stored data.
• Access Controls: Access controls allow the storage of sensitive historical data in Big Objects for compliance purposes.

Final Thoughts

The Salesforce Activity object field limit challenge is a reminder that proactive management strategies are a must. We hope this article was able to demonstrate how considering field management, such as routine audits and strategic custom object allocation, enables organizations to navigate these limits effectively. 

It doesn’t matter if the limit is 100 or 300 – with sufficient planning and some creative modifications to their architecture, organizations can vastly improve the usefulness and scale of their Salesforce ecosystem. These streamline existing activities and position systems to handle future requirements, paving the way for sustained organizational success.