As companies grow, so does the number of Salesforce users across different teams. Since one of the main goals is to always have the most up-to-date information in the CRM, hundreds or even thousands of changes to the data will happen daily – how can you effectively monitor who makes these edits and when they were made?
In this article, we’ll explore the out-of-the-box options and considerations for tracking individual field changes, how the functionality can be enabled, and what’s new.
What Is Field History Tracking?
The name is a definite giveaway for this functionality, as it does exactly what it says: tracks the who, the when, and the what when it comes to field updates in Salesforce. The option is available for some standard objects and custom objects.
The advantage of using this functionality is that you and your users can keep an eye out for any incorrect changes and run reports and queries to proactively monitor the key fields in your organization. While formula fields for example can’t be tracked at all, you can track the who and when for long text or multi-select picklists, but not what exactly changed. For simple picklists, however, you can know exactly which user was making the change, when they changed it, what the previous value was, and what the new value is.
Track Record Changes
To get started with history tracking, you can navigate to the object of your choice, and in the Fields & Relationship section, click on Set History Tracking. For standard objects, you will have the object to enable or disable right here, then choose the fields.
For custom objects on the other hand, make sure to check first that the optional feature Track Field History is enabled in the Details section before coming back to this page and selecting the fields.
The changes start being tracked from the moment the field is selected, but in order for them to be visible to users, make sure to add the history-related list to the Page Layout and/or Record Page depending on your implementation.
Users will be able to easily see and deep dive into the changes, and depending on the field type, some details may or may not be available as mentioned above. For example, while we can see that the Industry picklist went from not having a value to “Consulting”, we can’t see the original or new values for Description, as these are not available for fields over 255 characters.
Being able to review changes on individual records is great, but not scalable – if you’d like to check out the changes for one particular field across all Accounts, for example. You can however also rapidly check the changes for one particular Account without having to go through the UI. Note that while for standard objects the name format is similar to Accounts, like AccountHistory or CampaignHistory let’s say, for custom objects it would be the name of the object with the __History suffix.
Upgraded Experience
We are getting close to Summer ‘24 hitting production orgs, and it’s imperative that you know about the various changes and enhancements coming your way. Even before release notes are available, already existing preview orgs are updated and ready for you to take a look if you have one.
History tracking didn’t really get an update in a long time, and luckily this changes with the latest release. While you may be familiar with navigating to Fields & Relationships and then to the Set History Tracking button, what if you had a dedicated Setup page to manage all the object’s field history?
One of the Summer ‘24 enhancements is exactly that; a separate Field History Tracking page that you will now find in Setup, where you can control both the tracked objects as well as the fields. Additionally, you can easily see the number of tracked fields right from the get-go before starting to make any changes.
On this page, you can swiftly update the fields for multiple objects one after another, rather than navigating to each one separately in Object Manager. As you can see below, the list of fields opens in a side panel, where changes can also be saved, right before moving to the next object from the main list.
Considerations
When working with any tool or functionality in general, it’s worth taking a look at any considerations or limitations before using it. Field History Tracking is no exception, with there being quite a few things to keep in mind:
- Historical change data is retained for up to 18 months in the UI and for up to 24 months via API. Retention policies can be set, and you can retain history as needed by purchasing Field Audit Trail.
- While for most standard and custom fields you will be able to track everything, for some field types you can only track who made the change and when, not the old and new values.
- There is a hard limit of 20 fields per standard or custom object that can be selected for history tracking. This limit can be increased to 60 by purchasing Field Audit Trail.
- Unlike other objects, Tasks and Events support field history tracking but with a limit of 6 fields each.
- Changes that are happening in system context, for example through a Salesforce Flow, are not tracked if the current user doesn’t have permissions to the field. The reason behind this is the fact that history tracking fully respects user permissions.
Make sure to go through the entire list of noted considerations to avoid any potential surprises.
Summary
Maintaining data integrity and offering visibility into record changes within Salesforce, regardless of who is making them, can prove useful in a number of situations, especially when audits are happening. While only 20 fields can be tracked without purchasing the additional product to increase the limit, you can at least capture the most critical updates’ history.
What is one field you wish you would have tracked right from the get-go? Let us know in the comments below!