Before You Deactivate a Salesforce User, Find Out What They Own

Someone leaves the company, and offboarding lands on your desk. Before you deactivate their user record, you need to know what they owned — which accounts, which opportunities, which records on custom objects nobody outside your team even knows exist — so ownership gets handled deliberately instead of quietly freezing on a deactivated user. Reassigning records before deactivating a Salesforce user starts with knowing the full list, and that's the part Salesforce doesn't hand you.

The usual approach is a SOQL query against Account, then Opportunity, then Case, then whatever custom objects your org has, run one at a time, hoping you remembered every object that has an owner field.

One count, across every object, at once

Data Reassignment Assistant, part of Power User Toolkit, automates the part that's tedious rather than hard:

1. Pick the user.

2. Pick which objects to check — the list is generated automatically from every object in the org that's queryable, updateable, and has an OwnerId field, so you're choosing from a complete list instead of trying to remember one.

3. Run the count. Every selected object is queried in parallel, with a progress bar while it works.

4. Review the results in a sortable table, and export to CSV when you need the numbers in writing.

What it's for, and what it isn't

This is an audit tool, not a bulk-reassignment button. It tells you the scope of the problem — three opportunities, one active case, forty rows on a custom object nobody flagged — so the actual reassignment happens as a deliberate decision, whether that's you reassigning ownership by hand, routing records to a team queue, or handing the exported list to whoever owns that call. That's the right level of automation for this: counting and surfacing is safe to run unattended, moving ownership around isn't.

Why the count matters more than it sounds

The real risk in offboarding isn't usually the obvious stuff — everyone remembers to reassign the accounts a sales rep owned. It's the object nobody thought to check: a handful of records on a custom object built for one project two years ago, still owned by someone who no longer has access once they're deactivated. Running the full-object check once, before deactivation, is what catches that.

Offboarding usually raises a second question too — whether any of what they owned contains sensitive data. See How to Find PII Hiding in a Salesforce Org, or start at the Power User Toolkit overview.

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