Let’s explore how hidden changes in your Salesforce environment lead to increased damage for your business operations and how to fix it.
Why do untracked changes prove problematic? The lack of documentation for changes proves to be more than just an IT challenge.
The consequences of undocumented changes result in decreased productivity, damaged business operations and increased compliance dangers. These issues also serve to delay innovation efforts.
This article investigates the actual costs associated with such changes and discusses their common occurrence within Salesforce organizations while presenting methods to enhance both security and transparency without hindering operational speed.
Why Most Salesforce Changes Go Undocumented — and Why It's a Problem Salesforce is designed to be flexible. Administrators possess direct access to make real-time changes that directly push updates to the production environment. The platform's flexibility creates dangerous conditions when users lack appropriate controls.
Many organizations follow these procedures when making organizational changes.
Updates made directly in production The updates exist only in production environments and are missing from Jira and Asana documentation systems as well as every other documentation platform Not tracked in version control Not reviewed before going live Not revertible when something breaks Without documentation, teams are left guessing when something breaks.
“How Undocumented Salesforce Changes Cost You Time, Money, and Customers” or “Top 4 Business Risks of Skipping Salesforce Change Documentation”
Many teams don’t think about the dollars lost to undocumented changes every year. On the smaller end, Salesforce teams can lose somewhere between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on your team’s size.
When it comes to where this money slips through the cracks, it can disappear monthly in your team’s salaries if they spend more hours cleaning up data vs. improving it, or you can foot the bill in one go when specifically built customizations go wrong.
There’s no exact number to determine the cost of undocumented changes. Still, we’ll provide some estimates in the sections below to help you conceptualize the damage caused when changes aren’t tracked.
1. Troubleshooting Takes Longer The failure of Salesforce automation systems or reports or page layouts creates a situation where teams must spend long hours identifying the problem source.
Teams must manually identify system changes because documentation and version history tracking are absent which results in lengthy manual comparison of environments and incorrect assumption identification and reverse engineering to fix the problem.
The cumulative effect of dozens of changes happening weekly creates a major productivity challenge.
The biggest loss here is engineering man-hours. When your team is spending 50% of their time on cleaning up processes, how can you expect them to roll out new features promptly?
2. Broken Business Processes Unnoticed modifications frequently produce unforeseen side effects.
A validation rule update prevents sales representatives from saving opportunities. A permission tweak restricts access for support users. A Flow update sends emails to the wrong customers. These disruptions have a broader business impact than typical system bugs, affecting both revenue and customer experience. Most of these issues have the potential to be avoided.
While this can give a negative impression to your team and customers, most often, your money is lost through employee turnover and customer churn. If the system you always needed to work didn’t, you would likely find a new one! Your employees and customers share the same sentiment.
When it comes to replacing employees, the average cost to replace a team member is 3-4 times their average annual salary. Most teams will spend over $100,000 replacing a single sales team member.
As for customers, you’re not only looking at the immediate loss of their revenue, but the associated new customer acquisition costs. While these costs vary by industry and company size, here’s a ballpark of what they can look like.
Mid-Market with SDRs, AEs, demos, the works - $2,000-15,000
Enterprise with longer sales cycles, field sales, and RFPs - $25,000-100,000
While those are ballparks, that’s per client! So if you’re thinking about replacing 3-5% of your business that’s churning, that can add up quickly.
When it comes to churned customers, you can’t just think about the cost of the acquisition, but also about the loss of potential upsells and expansion on top of their lost recurring revenue.
To put the whole equation into perspective, if your average contact value is $100,000 and you’re an enterprise company who loses 10 customers a year…
Your lost recurring revenue: $1,000,000.
Your lost upsell/expansion opportunities: $200,000
Your wasted customer acquisition cost (anywhere from $25,000-$100,000): $250,000-1,000,000.
Total revenue loss in those 10 churned customers alone?
$1.5m -$2.2m.
Change tracking isn’t just about a better user experience; it’s about avoiding the short and long-term costs associated with replacing business.
3. Failed Compliance or Security Reviews Organizations under regulatory requirements must treat undocumented modifications as warning signs. Auditors need detailed records about all changes, including who made them, when, and what the reasons were. Teams that cannot deliver this information reveal inadequate internal controls, which might lead to audit findings and potential penalties.
Any executive or customer who demands organizational accountability must receive straightforward information about platform changes.
Compliance and security protect your organization, and when things go wrong, it can fall like dominoes. A single error can expose your entire organization to hacking, data theft, and other risks.
Once something like this occurs, you’ll be footing the bill with litigation and reparation efforts to fix your image and create credibility.
In the US, a data breach class action suit can cost you anywhere from 3 to 21 million dollars.
4. Lost Team Trust When changes fail to receive documentation, problems develop. The team begins to blame each other. Admins, devs, and ops teams lose trust in one another. Leadership loses confidence in the platform. Shadow IT emerges. Morale drops.
Changes like this prove to be a visibility and process problem rather than a tooling challenge.
Teams that face these costs suffer from low morale and general disengagement in their development teams.
Did you know that every disengaged developer on your team is costing your company somewhere between 18%-34% of their salary? If you’re paying your developers an average salary of $100,000, then you’re losing $ 18,000 to $34,000 per employee per year to disengagement.
Why Documenting Salesforce Changes is So Hard (And What To Do About It) The problem stems from neither laziness nor negligence. This situation results from several key factors.
Salesforce Enables Direct Changes Unlike traditional code environments, Salesforce allows changes directly in production. The flexibility allows users to make changes without documentation which is a drawback.
Most Version Control Tools Aren’t Built for Salesforce Admins and metadata-based platforms require different version control workflows than what traditional Git provides. When developers implement version control they fail to include declarative changes in their system.
Speed Is Prioritized Over Process The goal of rapid growth takes precedence in modern business environments. Admins face daily pressure to finish their tasks. The documentation and change tracking processes appear unnecessary but the absence of proper systems makes them feel that way.
The Fix: Visibility, Versioning, and Workflow The improved approach provides flexibility to balance both speed and accountability. The solution begins with three essential principles.
1. Track Every Change. A tool should track metadata changes in real time while versioning them automatically without requiring Git commands or manual exports. This approach ensures point-and-click changes made by administrators become part of the version history. Your team will have a dependable history of all modifications that include Flow updates and field removals.2. Require Context and Review. Changes must always link to tickets and business requests along with documented objectives for standard practice. Even basic approval processes function as a barrier to stop dangerous modifications from getting through to production. A combination of change tracking and business context enables clear understanding when something breaks or needs auditing.3. Make Rollback Possible . You can execute rapid change reversals when a deployment causes issues. With versioned metadata and deployment logs, you can. Your team would need to try to solve problems while hoping that someone has the information about the previous modifications. Your team will deploy more often with reduced deployment apprehension when they have a safe rollback mechanism at their disposal.The Practical Application of This Process Through Blue Canvas Blue Canvas enables Salesforce teams to remove undocumented changes while preserving current administrator and developer work methods.
Blue Canvas provides customers with these essential features.
Automatic tracking of all metadata changes (including declarative ones) Version history and diff views to see exactly what changed One-click rollback and recovery options Approval workflows to prevent unauthorized pushes to production Deployment logs with full visibility No more guessing games. No more “who did this?” emails. Just a shared source of truth for every change.
Final Thoughts The practice of undocumented changes represents both a negative workplace habit and an invisible organizational cost which escalates with each unmonitored modification or unscheduled update or business process failure.
Salesforce teams can speed up their work while ensuring safety through the implementation of visible operations combined with basic governance and intelligent tool systems.
Your changes do not need to stay secret.
Your Salesforce deployment process needs clarity and control which you can achieve now?
👉 See how Blue Canvas makes it easy.
