USE CASE: Ensuring Correct Salesforce “In Progress” Project Start Date

Problem: When work starts on a project, the start date is the wrong date

Many projects require a good deal of planning—tasks and milestones, resources and personnel, and time and budget estimations. All this must be done before the actual project work gets underway. Initially, when a project is created in Salesforce, the start date often reflects the start of planning. However, when the transition is made to “In Progress,” it is important to revise the start date to begin executing the plan and reflect the reality of the project effort. Sometimes this is overlooked.

Solution: Automatically warn the Salesforce user to revise the start date to the current date

Using the Free Edition of the Data Quality Helper app, an Admin can easily create hard or soft validation rules to address various situations and inform users of the required or desired elements.

Salesforce default functionality only allows hard validation rules—if records are not properly created/updated, the save/submit is prevented. With the added functionality of Data Quality Helper, Admins have more flexibility to design unique validation rules that better serve organization goals across a number of situations, beyond this incorrect start date example. In addition, Admins can craft warning messages, customized by content and formatting. Finally, the app can provide a list view of all new and existing records with unresolved data validation issues—making future data cleanup easier. (Check out the Data Quality Helper Admin Guide for step-by-step instructions on how to set up validation rules.)

In this particular use case, the Admin has chosen to use a soft validation rule and customized warning empowering the Salesforce user to make a decision on how to proceed.

This warning says: “It appears as though the Start Date of this Project was not updated when its Stage was set to ‘In Progress’. Are you sure you would like to continue with the Save?”

In most cases, Project start dates are updated when work begins on it. However, sometimes users forget to change the status on a Project when work begins. These types of situations do not warrant the prevention of Save (like with Salesforce’s default hard validation). The choice whether to use this app’s soft or hard validation is an Admin and organizational decision.

The good news is that, with Data Quality Helper, unresolved validation issues remain attached to the record. They aren’t one-time-only and just disappear. So it serves as a reminder to add the missing information later.

Besides enhanced data validation, this app also offers duplicate data detection and resolution that exceeds default Salesforce functionality. Plus, don’t forget to take advantage of the list view that shows all validation and duplication issues detected by the rules Admins created. Install the free version today!