Salesforce Administrator Certification Prep
Organizational Setup
Your Organization's Foundation
Before you can build anything in Salesforce, you need to lay the foundation. This starts with the Company Information page, found in Setup. Think of this as the digital headquarters for your organization. It's where you define core settings that affect everything from what language users see to how your financial year is structured. Getting this right from the start is crucial.
Your organization's default locale determines the display format for dates, times, numbers, and names. For example, a US locale would show June 5, 2024, as 6/5/2024, while a UK locale would show it as 05/06/2024. While you set a default for the whole organization, individual users can override this in their personal settings if they work in a different region.
Setting the correct default locale ensures consistency for most users, but allowing personal overrides provides flexibility for global teams.
Currency settings are just as important. You'll set a default currency for your organization, which will be used for all financial fields like opportunity amounts and report totals. If your company operates in multiple countries, you can enable multi-currency. Once enabled, this feature cannot be turned off. It allows you to record amounts in different currencies and have them automatically convert to your corporate default currency for reporting.
Defining Your Business Calendar
Your fiscal year is your company's financial calendar, and it's essential for forecasting, quotas, and reporting. Salesforce lets you define a fiscal year that matches how your business operates. You have two choices: standard or custom.
| Fiscal Year Type | Structure | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | Follows the Gregorian calendar, starting on the first day of any month. | Companies whose financial year aligns with standard calendar months. |
| Custom | Can be structured in non-standard ways, like 4-4-5 week quarters. | Companies with unique retail or manufacturing cycles. |
Once you define a fiscal year, all your reports, forecasts, and quotas will align with its structure. Be careful: once you enable a custom fiscal year, you can't go back to a standard one.
You can also set up business hours and holidays. This tells Salesforce when your support teams are available. These settings are used in processes like case escalations and entitlement management to ensure customer issues are handled within your service-level agreements.
Licenses and User Interface
Every user in Salesforce needs a license. A license is what determines a user's baseline level of access to features and data. There are different types of licenses, each providing a different set of functionalities.
The main license types you'll encounter are:
- User Licenses: Determine the functionality a user can access. The standard 'Salesforce' license grants full access to standard CRM features.
- Feature Licenses: Grant access to additional features not included in a user license, like Marketing or Knowledge Base access.
- Permission Set Licenses: Incrementally grant users access to features that are not included in their assigned user license.
Think of a user license as a ticket to the amusement park, and feature licenses as tickets for specific rides inside.
| Common User License | Typical Use Case |
|---|---|
| Salesforce | For users who need full access to standard CRM and AppExchange apps. |
| Salesforce Platform | For users who need access to custom apps but not standard CRM functionality. |
| Chatter Free | For users who don't have a Salesforce license but need access to Chatter. |
Finally, Salesforce allows you to adjust the user interface (UI) to improve efficiency. From the User Interface page in Setup, you can enable features like inline editing (which lets users edit fields directly from a record's detail page) and collapsible sections. These small tweaks can significantly improve how users navigate and interact with the platform, making their jobs easier.
A sales manager in the US notices that the dates on reports created by a colleague in the UK are formatted as day/month/year, while their own reports show month/day/year. What is the most likely reason for this difference?
Once multi-currency is enabled in a Salesforce organization, it can be disabled by a system administrator.
With these foundational settings configured, your Salesforce organization has a solid base to build upon.