In the medical world, "medical history" is the process of knowing people's past medical occurrences. It has a great value because medical practitioners must know your medical history to assess your present situation properly. Now, let’s apply this to Salesforce. A field in Salesforce can be dynamic like its type can change, or its values can be altered. So, how do you keep track of its 'history'? It can be done through Field History Tracking.
Field history tracking is a significant feature in Salesforce that helps an administrator understand a field’s data lifecycle within a company’s Salesforce environment. The field is one of the most critical parts of Salesforce, and changes in it must be recorded for data integrity, compliance, and auditory purposes. As a Salesforce administrator, you want to avoid being in a situation where you cannot explain the changes made to a field, especially if they affect the data integrity of the org.
Did you know that changing the data type can cause a complete loss of that field’s data in your org? This is why it is best practice to back up your data before changing a field type. You can back up your data by exporting it using the Data Loader software, and after changing the field type, you can import it back into your org.
Step 1: Launch Salesforce and navigate to the gear ⚙ icon
Step 2: Navigate the object manager
Step 3: Select the specific object you want to enable Field History Tracking for. For our guide, we will use contacts.
Step 4: Select Field & Relationships and navigate your cursor to Set History Tracking.
Step 5: Tick the Enable Contact History checkbox, select the fields you want to track on the Contact History-related list, and save. Whenever a user modifies any fields selected below, the old and new field values, the date, time, nature of the change, and the user making the change are added to the History-related list. Note that you can only enable up to 20 fields.
After doing this, you can add the history section from the related list. You can now track your field’s history from the contact history-related list.
By tracking a field’s history, you can learn the changes made to the field, the changed data, the users who made the change, and the previous and current values in the field.
As a Salesforce administrator, you will have many responsibilities, including ensuring data compliance with key company policies and data integrity as the workflow progresses. You will also check audit trails to identify changes made in the org along with many other responsibilities. These listed functions are, in one way or another, linked to the Field History Tracking feature. It's important for you as an administrator to understand this important feature.
