10 Signs Your Salesforce Org Has Technical Debt
Learn to recognize the warning signs of technical debt in your Salesforce implementation before they become critical issues.
Technical debt in Salesforce is like credit card debt—easy to accumulate, painful to pay off, and it compounds over time. Here are the warning signs that your org might be carrying more debt than you realize.
1. "Don't Touch That" Syndrome
If your team is afraid to modify certain automations, triggers, or configurations because "no one knows what they do," that's a red flag. When institutional knowledge lives only in the heads of former employees, you're sitting on a time bomb.
2. Slow Page Load Times
Salesforce pages should load in 2-3 seconds. If your users are waiting 10+ seconds, something is wrong. Common culprits include too many automations firing on record save, inefficient SOQL queries, or bloated page layouts with unnecessary fields.
3. Duplicate and Conflicting Automations
Over the years, different admins add different automations. Eventually, you end up with Flows, Process Builders, Workflow Rules, and Apex triggers all doing overlapping things—sometimes conflicting with each other.
4. Unused Custom Fields Everywhere
Open any object and count the custom fields. Now count how many are actually populated with data. If more than 30% are empty or unused, you've got clutter that confuses users and slows down your org.
5. "It's Always Been Like That"
When you ask why something works a certain way and the answer is "I don't know, it's always been like that," that's technical debt talking. Processes should exist for a reason, and that reason should be documented.
6. Reports Timing Out
Reports that worked fine last year now time out regularly. This usually indicates data volume growth combined with inefficient report designs or missing indexes on key fields.
7. Everyone Is a System Administrator
The path of least resistance is giving everyone admin access. But this creates security risks, audit nightmares, and makes it impossible to track who changed what.
8. Validation Rules That Don't Make Sense
Validation rules added for one-time scenarios that are now irrelevant. Rules that conflict with each other. Rules that no one can explain. Each one adds friction for users and complexity for admins.
9. Integration Errors in the Background
Check your email logs and error reports. If integrations are silently failing—sending errors to an inbox no one monitors—you might be missing critical data syncs without knowing it.
10. Users Have Given Up
The ultimate sign of technical debt: users maintaining spreadsheets because Salesforce is "too hard to use." When your CRM becomes an obstacle rather than a tool, you're not getting ROI—you're losing it.
What To Do About It
Recognizing technical debt is the first step. The next step is quantifying it—understanding exactly what you're dealing with and prioritizing what to fix first. That's where an independent audit can help.