You don't need a $30,000 consulting engagement to find out what's wrong with your Salesforce. You need 15 minutes and this checklist.
These are the 10 checks we run on the first day of every engagement — before we look at a single dashboard, before we review any automation, before we talk to the sales team. They reveal 80% of the issues in any org, and they take less time than your morning coffee run.
Open your Salesforce right now. We're doing this live.
Check 1: Duplicate Record Count (2 minutes)
Go to Reports → New Report → Contacts & Accounts. Add a filter: "Duplicate Record Set Name" is not empty. Run the report. Count the results.
Now divide that number by your total Contact count. That percentage is your duplicate rate.
- Below 3%: You're in good shape.
- 3–10%: Common. Manageable with a cleanup effort.
- 10–20%: Your data is unreliable. Reports, email sends, and pipeline metrics are all inflated.
- Above 20%: Critical. Every report you pull is fundamentally wrong.
What to check next: Setup → Duplicate Management → Duplicate Rules. Are they active? If you see three rules all showing "Inactive" — nobody ever turned them on.
Check 2: Validation Rules (1 minute)
Go to Setup → Object Manager → Contact → Validation Rules. How many active rules do you see?
- Zero: Your org has no guardrails. Anyone can save any record with any data (or no data).
- 1–3: You have basic protection. Check what the rules enforce.
- 4+: Someone intentionally set up data quality controls.
Repeat for Lead, Account, and Opportunity. The Opportunity object is the most important — if Amount, Close Date, and Stage aren't enforced, your pipeline data is unreliable.
Check 3: Field-Level Security (2 minutes)
Go to Setup → Object Manager → Contact → Fields & Relationships → pick any sensitive field → View Field Accessibility. If every profile shows "Visible" — your field-level security isn't configured.
Quick fix: Identify the 5–10 fields that contain sensitive information. Restrict visibility to only the profiles that need it. This takes about 30 minutes and dramatically improves your security posture.
Check 4: Login History (1 minute)
Go to Setup → Login History. Compare the number of users who've logged in recently to your total active user licenses (Setup → Company Information → User Licenses).
Every user who hasn't logged in for 90+ days is a license you're paying for that generates zero value. At $150–300 per user per month, a company with 10 inactive licenses is burning $1,500–3,000 every month.
Action: Deactivate users who haven't logged in for 90+ days. For users who log in rarely, investigate why — usually it's a training issue or a UX issue.
Check 5: Automation Inventory (2 minutes)
Go to Setup → Flows. Filter to Active. Count them. Then ask yourself: can you explain what each one does?
If the answer is "I recognize about half of them" — you have automation debt. Flows, Process Builders, and Workflow Rules accumulate over time. Someone builds one to solve a problem, then leaves the company.
What to look for specifically:
- Flows in "Failed" or "Waiting" status: Setup → Paused Flow Interviews. Anything here means an automation broke and nobody noticed.
- Process Builders: Setup → Process Builder. These are legacy (Salesforce is deprecating them).
- Workflow Rules: Setup → Workflow Rules. Even older. If you have active Workflow Rules that do similar things to your Flows, you may have redundant automations fighting each other.
Check 6: Sharing Model (1 minute)
Go to Setup → Sharing Settings. Look at the Organization-Wide Defaults table. If every object shows "Public Read/Write" — your sharing model is wide open.
The recommended starting point: Set Account, Contact, and Opportunity to "Private." Then use Sharing Rules to open access where needed. This is the principle of least privilege — start restrictive, add access deliberately.
Check 7: Report Folder Chaos (1 minute)
Go to the Reports tab. Look at the left sidebar. Is there a clean folder structure? Or is everything in "Unfiled Public Reports" and folders named after people who left the company two years ago?
The fix takes 20 minutes: Create 5–6 folders (Sales, Service, Marketing, Operations, Executive, Archive). Move every report into the right folder. Delete anything that hasn't been used in 90 days.
Check 8: Storage Usage (1 minute)
Go to Setup → Storage Usage. If either Data Storage or File Storage is above 80%, you're approaching a hard cap. When you hit 100%, users get errors and integrations fail.
Quick fix for immediate relief: Delete old email attachments (older than 2 years). Purge integration logs. Archive records from deactivated features.
Check 9: API Usage (1 minute)
Go to Setup → System Overview. Look at "API Requests, Last 24 Hours." If you're consistently above 70% of your API limit, you have integrations consuming excessive resources.
How to investigate: Setup → API Usage Notifications. Set an alert at 70%. When it fires, check which Connected App is consuming the most calls.
Check 10: The "Two People, Same Number" Test (2 minutes)
Ask two people on your team — a manager and a rep — to each pull "total open pipeline value" right now. Do the numbers match?
If no — you have a fundamental reporting problem. The mismatch is caused by one of 7 things: different date range filters, different stage inclusions, different record type visibility, different running user permissions, Created Date vs Close Date confusion, currency conversion inconsistencies, or stale snapshot vs live data.
Your 15-Minute Audit Is Done
You just checked the 10 things that reveal 80% of issues in any Salesforce org. No consultant required. No $30K engagement. Just 15 minutes and an admin login.
- 3 or fewer issues: Your org is in better shape than most. Focus on optimization.
- 4–6 issues: You have real gaps that are probably causing business problems today.
- 7+ issues: Your Salesforce needs serious attention. Every week you wait, the problems compound.