At the latest Brisbane Salesforce User Group meeting, we presented to the group how to enforce business process and how to keep your critical data clean using validation rules within Salesforce CRM.
We looked at 6 great rules that we have used for organisations around the world and some especially for Australia including enforcing the Australian States, phone numbers and Postcode ranges.
Salesforce Help states the following in their help & training:
“Improve the quality of your data using validation rules. Validation rules verify that the data a user enters in a record meets the standards you specify before the user can save the record. A validation rule can contain a formula or expression that evaluates the data in one or more fields and returns a value of “True” or “False.” Validation rules also include an error message to display to the user when the rule returns a value of “True” due to an invalid value. Improve the quality of your data using validation rules. Validation rules verify that the data a user enters in a record meets the standards you specify before the user can save the record. A validation rule can contain a formula or expression that evaluates the data in one or more fields and returns a value of “True” or “False.” Validation rules also include an error message to display to the user when the rule returns a value of “True” due to an invalid value.”
We created the following rules:
- Order (number) received before Opportunity is closed
- Prevent an Opportunity from being edited when closed
- Dates are in sequence
- Billing Address includes an Australia State
- Complex Regex validations – Phone Number (Australia)
- Complex Regex validations – Australian Postcodes
If you want to create them yourself, you can follow the steps which we have made available via our ScreenstepsLive account.