Salesforce technical debt: what to clean first
Technical debt is the biggest challenge Salesforce admins name for 2026. In one large admin survey, 56.3% said so, and only 13% of entry-level admins felt confident managing it. The reason is simple: "retire 40 unused fields" never wins against a request from the sales team. A safe order helps, because it lets you remove clutter in small steps.
Start with a record of what exists
Before you delete anything, list your custom fields, flows, Apex classes, reports and permission sets. Add a description and an owner to each item you keep. Without a purpose written down, every deletion is a guess.
Step 1: Stale reports, dashboards and email templates
These carry the least risk. Look for items nobody has opened in a year, move them to a folder, and delete them after a month if nobody complains.
Step 2: Inactive users and unused licenses
This is where the savings are. List users who have not logged in for 90 days, and compare the license each person holds with what they actually do. Reclaim or downgrade what you can.
Step 3: Unused fields
Check where each field is used: page layouts, reports, flows, validation rules and code. Hide a field before you delete it, and wait a release cycle to see whether anything breaks. Some vendors report that a large share of custom fields in a typical org are never filled in, so the opportunity is usually big.
Step 4: Permission sets
Take your ten most-assigned permission sets and ask one question of each: who needs this, and why? Replace overlapping profiles and sets with a small number of clear ones. This matters more now, because AI agents act with the permissions you give them.
Step 5: Old automation
Retire the old Workflow Rules and Process Builder automations that Salesforce has moved away from, and rebuild what is still needed as Flows.
Safety rules
- Back up your metadata before each batch.
- Test changes in a sandbox first.
- Change one thing at a time, and write down what you changed.
- About four in ten admins still deploy with change sets, which keep no version history or rollback, so keep your own record.
Salesforce Labs offers a free tool, Org Check, that flags unused components and missing descriptions. It is a good first scan.
We talk with Salesforce teams about ranking this clean-up automatically. If that is a problem you are living with, book a discovery call.