Salesforce support
Our Salesforce admin quit: what to do in the first 30 days
Your Salesforce admin quit. A 30 day plan to secure access, find what ran under their name, keep the team working and decide who looks after it next.
Your Salesforce admin gave notice, or simply stopped showing up, and the system now belongs to whoever was closest. Often that is an IT manager who already runs everything else, an operations lead, or the owner. Sales is still logging deals, reports still go out on Monday, and nobody is sure what the admin set up or what will break when their account goes away.
If your Salesforce admin quit, the answer to “what now” is a short, ordered plan. Keep at least one other working admin login, freeze the departed admin’s account rather than deactivating it, find everything that runs under their name, and only then decide who should own Salesforce next. Done in that order, the month is mostly cleanup, not firefighting.
Before the last day, if you still have it
If the admin is working out a notice period, a few hours of their time is worth more than any document they might write. Sit with them and ask them to show you, on screen, the answers to these questions:
- Which integrations connect to Salesforce, and whose login does each one use?
- What runs on a schedule: reports, data exports, imports, automated emails?
- Which automations do they worry about, and which ones break often?
- What requests are waiting, and which ones did they promise to someone?
- Where are the passwords, notes, sandboxes and any outside tools they used?
Record the session if you can. Also make sure at least one other person, ideally two, has a working System Administrator login before the admin leaves. A company with a single admin who is now gone can still recover access, but it is slow and avoidable.
Your 30 day checklist after the Salesforce admin quit
The plan below is written for someone who is not an admin. Some steps need a person comfortable in Setup, so pair the business owner with your most technical user or with outside help for those.
| When | What to do |
|---|---|
| Day 1 | Confirm who has admin access. Freeze the departed admin’s user. Change passwords for any shared logins they knew. |
| Week 1 | Download the Setup Audit Trail. List integrations, scheduled jobs and anything owned by or sent to the old admin. |
| Week 2 | Move integrations to a dedicated integration user. Reassign scheduled reports, dashboard running users, flow and email alert recipients, queue members and default owners. |
| Week 3 | Transfer the records they owned. Test deactivation in a recently refreshed sandbox, then deactivate in production. |
| Week 4 | Set up a single place for user requests. Decide who owns Salesforce from here. |
Freeze first, deactivate later. Freezing blocks the login straight away but keeps everything that references the user in place. Salesforce’s own help notes that a frozen user still holds their license, so freezing is a holding step, not the end state.
Save the change history now. The Setup Audit Trail shows who changed what in Setup, and it keeps only the last 180 days (Salesforce Help: Setup Audit Trail). Download it in the first week. It is the closest thing to a diary of what your admin worked on recently.
Look for their name everywhere. The usual hiding places are integrations that log in as the admin, scheduled reports and dashboards that run as them, flows and email alerts that notify them, assignment rules and queues, and the default owner for new leads and cases. Salesforce warns that processes cannot update records owned by inactive users, and that you cannot deactivate a user who is the only recipient of a workflow email alert (Salesforce Help: deactivation considerations). Either one can make something quietly stop working after the account is switched off.
Give integrations their own user. If your ERP, marketing tool or phone system logs in as a person, move it to a dedicated integration user now, so the next departure does not break it. On Enterprise, Unlimited, Performance and Developer editions, Salesforce offers an Integration user license built for this, with API access only.
What usually breaks, and how you will notice
Little breaks loudly. A weekly pipeline report stops arriving and someone assumes it was retired. New web leads land with nobody, because the default owner was the admin. An order sync from the ERP fails every night and nobody is on the error email. Old automation built with Workflow Rules or Process Builder, now out of support, is easy to miss; our guide to Workflow Rules end of support covers how to find it.
The fix is to ask the team directly. In week one, send a short note to sales, service and finance: tell us anything in Salesforce that looks different, late or missing. An ag equipment dealer near Grand Island will feel a missed lead in harvest season far faster than any admin report will show it. Give people one place to report it, and write each issue down.
Who looks after Salesforce next
There are three honest options, and the right one depends on how much change your team asks for and how complex the org is.
Hire a replacement when the backlog of requests is steady every week, the org has custom code or several integrations, and you want someone in the building who knows the business. Expect the search to take time, so you still need cover while you hire.
Use outside support when requests come in bursts, when the org is small enough that a full time role would sit idle, or when you need cover now and do not yet know what the job should be. For example, a manufacturer in Davenport with 40 users and one ERP connection could fit here. Ask for named response times and written notes on every change, so you are never in this position again.
Train an internal owner when the org is simple, mostly standard objects with few integrations, and someone on the team is curious and has time. For example, it can suit a 15 person firm in Colorado Springs. It works poorly when that person already has a full job.
A common middle path for midsize companies in Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Colorado is a mix: an internal owner for day to day requests and outside help for projects and backup.
Whichever you choose, the person who takes over needs a written picture of the org: what is connected, what is automated, who uses what, and what is fragile. If you want that picture built for you, our diagnostic takes two to three weeks at a fixed scope and price. We interview your team, map how data moves between systems, and hand over a costed roadmap and a risk register that you own, with no obligation to have us do the work.
Common questions
Should we delete the old admin’s user?
No. Salesforce does not let you delete users, so you freeze or deactivate them instead. Freeze the account on day one and deactivate it once nothing depends on it. A deactivated user no longer counts against your available licenses, but your bill only changes if you change your license count.
Can we lose access to Salesforce completely?
It can happen when the only admin leaves and nobody else has the System Administrator profile. Getting back in means working with Salesforce support, and your team waits meanwhile. The simple prevention is two active admins at all times.
How long does the handover take?
For a small, standard org, the steps above fit in a month. An org with custom code, several integrations or years of undocumented automation takes longer, and is worth having someone experienced review before you switch anything off.