Control Salesforce Data Storage with Zero Footprint Tokenization

Operating a business is expensive. From vendors and suppliers to utility companies and software providers, businesses must constantly spend money to move forward. Unfortunately, there’s a cost of doing business that you cannot avoid. However, if you’re using Salesforce to process thousands of transactions and storing customer data in your Org, there’s one huge expense that you can definitely manage –Salesforce Storage Fees.

We know, data is important when taking payments in Salesforce, and you want to store every bit of valuable customer information because it allows you to produce in-depth and rich reporting. But if you’re getting so much business that you’re beginning to hit or exceed Salesforce’s data storage limit and finding it necessary to purchase additional storage blocks every month, your margins will likely suffer.

The good news is, you can still collect all of this rich customer data in your financial systems and vastly reduce your Salesforce storage fees through Chargent’s Zero Footprint Tokenization feature.

The Impact of Salesforce Storage Fees

When our largest customers shared with us the number of transactions they were processing each month, we quickly realized the effect that storage fees made on their businesses. Some of them stated that they were processing millions of transactions and spending tens of thousands of dollars each year to increase their Salesforce storage usage for payment data.

How will a million transactions impact the amount you pay in Salesforce storage fees? Consider this scenario:

• Assume a business completes 1,000,000 transactions in a month. Of these, 10,000 are initial Chargent Orders and Chargent Transactions, and the rest are transactions against existing Chargent Orders.
• Generally, most Salesforce users receive around 10 GB of file storage for standard package editions. While this seems substantial, each record consumes around 2kb on average. Person Account records consume around 4kb and Campaigns consume around 8kb.
• To store a single month of transaction data, the business would require around 2,020mb of additional data storage (assuming the storage that is included with their user subscriptions is being utilized for storing other records).
• Salesforce typically charges $125 per month for 500mb of additional storage data. For 2020mb, a business could pay $500+ per month to store a single month’s worth of data.

Here’s the catch. If you aren’t offloading older payment data to an alternate storage solution, and you are running a high volume of transactions, the amount of storage you need will compound each month. In other words, the business would need to pay an additional $500 (or $1,000 total) the next month to store transactions from both periods. Over time, these storage fees can easily equate to tens of thousands of dollars in additional expenses.  

What is Tokenization?

In its simplest form, tokenization is the process of replacing sensitive information with nonsensitive placeholders in the form of a token. These tokens are used to secure, consolidate, and desensitize data by encrypting the information and securing it with randomized characters. Since tokens cannot be decoded, they present a new level of protection for data – especially payment data like credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and customer details.

Through Chargent’s Zero Footprint Tokenization feature, Salesforce users can use tokens to store their data more securely and with a fraction of the storage space that a traditional customer record occupies. 

What is Chargent’s Zero Footprint Tokenization?

Our customers love saving money, so they asked us to develop a solution to minimize these storage costs. The solution we delivered allowed them to tokenize their customers’ payment information without creating underlying related Salesforce records each time. With fewer records, you’ll require less storage space, and less storage space means you’ll save tremendously on Salesforce storage fees.

Our Principal Technical Architect, Eric Alexander, was inspired by Headless software initiatives like Headless Java and Headless Linux when developing this feature. With these projects as his motivation, he created a solution to enable Chargent customers to process payments in a way that similarly reduces the data footprint.

It didn’t take long for Eric to conceptualize the perfect solution –a component that allows Chargent customers to quickly tokenize payment data via a configurable user interface, anywhere within their Salesforce environment. We appropriately named this feature Zero Footprint Tokenization.

Eric wanted to avoid building a complex solution that was difficult and cumbersome to implement, so he developed this feature as a Lightning Component that users can quickly place within a Lightning App or within their own Lightning Components.

Chargent’s Zero Footprint Tokenization is easy to set up and solves your Salesforce storage issues by allowing you to save the data you require without driving up your storage expenses.

Maximize Your Salesforce Storage

When it comes to operating a business, every dollar counts – and we’re sure your accountant would agree. If you’re facing data storage issues in your Salesforce Org, our Zero Footprint Tokenization feature may be the answer to your problems.