In the last chapter, we went through ways of setting up a developer account. Now it's time to move forward to the next step. Company Information contains all basic information about your company, such as local address, fax number and phone numbers.

A business scenario: Universal Containers just brought Salesforce Lightning Unlimited Edition (LUE). Richard Gall has been working as the Salesforce administrator for two years, and he knows how to update the company's basic information, such as the company contact information, the default time zone, and the address.

Just to remind you, once the company has purchased the Salesforce organization, the company has to set up the company profile. Under the heading Setup (gear icon) | Setup | SETTINGS | Company Settings | Company Information, there are various setups available, as shown in the following screenshot:

At any time, the system administrator can update the company information in Salesforce. The Company Information...

A fiscal year or financial year is a period used for calculating annual (yearly) financial statements in businesses and other organizations. The system administrator can set the fiscal year for your organization. The fiscal year settings are used to report on the fiscal year timeline.

Salesforce supports two types of fiscal years:

Organization-wide default is also known as OWD. This is the base-level sharing and setting of objects in any organization. By using this, you can secure your data so that other users can't access data to which they haven't been allowed access. The following diagram shows the basic record security in Salesforce. In this, OWD plays a key role:

It's a base-level object setting in the organization, and you can't restrict the access below this. We will now discuss OWD in Salesforce.

A business scenario: Alok Sinfal is the system administrator at Universal Containers. As per the business requirement, he wants to set the security setting for the lead object so that the user who has created or owns the lead records, as well as users that are higher in the role hierarchy, can access the records.

Before thinking about any solution, you have to think about the OWD because it is the base-level setting to restrict object-level access in Salesforce. To achieve this, the...

Salesforce allows us to control the records access and organization reports using role. In other words, you can use it to control record-level access in Salesforce. It describes how roles connect to each other. It may or may not be exactly akin to your organization hierarchy. A role can have one, more than one, or even no users assigned to it. It is best practice to ensure that every user is assigned a role when they are first added to the system.

Users who are higher in the role hierarchy will be able to see the records of people below them. Users who share the same the role or who are at the same level (for example, the VP of Sales and the VP of Marketing) cannot access each other's records:

In the preceding image, the Managing Director can see all the organization records, as they are at the top of the role hierarchy. At the same time the Sales Director and Marketing Head can't see each other's records even though both are at the same level. While the Sales Director can...

To open record-level access for groups of users, role, or role and subordinates outside of the OWD, you can use the sharing rule. The sharing rule is used to open up access; you can't restrict the access using the sharing rule. Salesforce has the following types of sharing rules:

Profiles are a way to customize the overall experience of a Salesforce user. Profiles are used to decide the data security by granting object-level permissions and field-level security that decides which fields need to be shown to which specific set of users. Profiles have certain rules or settings that we can set in order to grant or restrict a set of user permissions. The role decides record-level access in Salesforce and the profile decides what users can see in those records, as well as which actions the user can perform.

Salesforce allows you assign only one profile to a user, but sometimes it's necessary to assign more than one profile to users based on your business requirements. Through the permission set, you can grant a group of settings and permissions to your users that allows them to access various apps and functions, in addition to the profile. The settings available in these permission sets are similar to those in profiles, but they extend the user's functional access without changing their profiles.

A business scenario: Eric Cordell  is working as Sales Manager West at Universal Containers. As per the initial business requirement, Sales Manager West can only access the opportunity records for an account that belongs to North America. Over the past few years, Eric helped Universal Containers to increase their sales pipeline from $15 million to $40 million. Now Sales Director Merint Mathew wants to grant all opportunities access (either edit or delete) to Eric Cordell, so he can manage...

Until now, we have talked about record-level access; it refers to governing which records are accessible by users, including the OWD and sharing rule. Now we will go a step further and discuss how we can hide key fields from a group of users. Data is very important for any organization; it may contain highly sensitive information, such as bank account details. Salesforce allows you to use field-level security to make fields hidden or read only for a specific profile. There are three ways to set field-level security in Salesforce: