7 Salesforce Automation Mistakes That Cost Companies Real Money

I've audited automation in over a dozen Salesforce orgs. These are the mistakes I see in literally every single one.

1. Process Builders That Should Be Flows

2. Workflow Rules Nobody Remembers Creating

I found an org with 47 Workflow Rules. The admin who created them left 3 years ago. Nobody knew what they did. Six of them were firing on every Account update, adding 2-3 seconds of latency to every save.

3. Validation Rules That Conflict

Org had 140 active validation rules. 12 of them contradicted each other — one required a field, another prevented it from being set. Users found workarounds that created even worse data quality issues.

4. Flows That Fire On Every Record Update

Record-triggered flows that don't check "when a record is created or updated to meet the condition" run on EVERY update. I've seen flows that fire 50,000+ times a day doing absolutely nothing because the entry criteria were never narrowed.

5. No Documentation Anywhere

Ask yourself: if your senior admin left tomorrow, could anyone explain what "Auto_Update_Territory_v3_FINAL_fixed" does? If the answer is no, you have a bus factor of 1 and your org is at risk.

6. Duplicate Automations

Two different admins solve the same problem two different ways. Now you have a flow AND a process builder AND a workflow rule all doing the same thing on the same object. They conflict, and nobody knows which one "wins."

7. No Testing Strategy

Changes go straight to production. No sandbox testing. No regression checks. One bad flow deployment takes down the whole org for an afternoon.

How to Find These in Your Org

Run a free health scan — it catches all 7 of these automatically and tells you exactly which ones you have.