Updating fields for Objects in Salesforce is routine as customer information changes. Being able to remember what certain values were a week or month ago would be quite handy. But remembering this data becomes impossible with hundreds of customers and many teammates using Salesforce. What’s the solution? That’s where Field History Tracking comes in.
Why would Field History Tracking be useful for your business?
In Salesforce, it often happens that when field values get changed, you’re left wondering what the previous value was, when someone updated it, or who specifically changed it. With Field History Tracking, the field history data is retained, giving you a logged list of this important data.
Salesforce allows you to track up to 20 fields per object (both standard or custom objects). By enabling Field History Tracking, you will see who made the change, the date it was updated, and the previous value of the field.
This feature helps you with a useful audit trail for reviewing or troubleshooting past changes. Changes to tracked fields are displayed in the Objects History Related list, and the data is retained for 18 months.
Salesforce Field History Tracking can also help you understand when a non-human “user” is making updates to fields, such as when a process builder makes a change to a field value, or an integration user updates a record from an external web site form.
Chargent recommends that you enable history tracking on key fields for both the Chargent Order and Transaction records. For Chargent, fields like the Charge Amount, an expiration date on a credit card, or a Token can be beneficial to see before and after values and when they changed.
When updating new data to fields, occasionally, that could impact your billing and cause transactions to fail. Field History Tracking then can help you review when a field was updated and its before and after values as well as understand what to fix if there are any future errors.
And with an increasing number of automation tools such as Process Builder, Field History Tracking can help troubleshoot configuration changes. This provides better visibility and awareness into automated processes that may update Salesforce’s record values.
Let’s Get Tracking
To enable Field History Tracking
- Click the gear icon and Choose Setup
- Under Objects and Fields, choose the Object Manager
- Select Chargent Order or Transactions depending on which one you’re doing first.
- Select Fields & Relationships
- Click the Set History Tracking button
- Choose what fields you want to track
- Be sure to click save.
Chargent recommends several key fields to track on the Chargent Order that can help troubleshoot problems with recurring billing.
- All billing fields, including Address and email address.
- All credit card fields, including credit card number and expiration date
- All charge fields, including the Charge Amount, Total, and Manual Charge checkbox
It’s not recommended to modify fields on the Transaction record; however, we recommend tracking the following fields for audit purposes.
- Amount
- Recurring status checkbox
- Response Status
- Type
Track Your History, Help Your Future
With Field History Tracking enabled, you will find it much easier to understand the timeline of a standard object, see previous data, and troubleshoot some simple errors when a record has been updated. Enabling Field History Tracking for custom objects is useful if you have multiple people interfacing with the customer data in Salesforce.
By enabling this helpful tool, you can see who edited what fields and when. This means you have an accurate record of a customer’s field history data over time.
Staying organized and tracking valuable data are just two ways Chargent will help you upgrade your billing process, and get more out of Salesforce. Get started today with a 30-day free trial, or contact us to learn more about how we can help your business thrive.
