Launchpad Lesson 3 - Company Settings Configuration

Now that we're logged in and know how to get to Setup, let's go there and configure some of our company settings for our Salesforce organization.

By organization, we simply mean the entire collection of your data, your users, your objects, and everything that's in your Salesforce.

In Salesforce, there are quite a few different settings that can be configured, but we are going to focus only on the necessary ones for now.

Remember, I'm going to demo this from the perspective of our made-up company, Rocket Shop.

Here, we'll show you how to quickly set up the following for your company: your company phone and address, the time zone for your main office, your company branding and logo, and some preferred account settings.

The beauty of this system, of course, is that you can log into Salesforce from any internet browser, anywhere, and never have to download anything onto your computer. That's the whole idea behind the cloud.

Okay, let's go into the admin Setup area that we showed you in the last lesson and use the Quick Find box to type "Company."

From the menu, we see an option for Company Information, and we click on that.

Let's click Edit and fill in some of these details for our company.

First, enter the main phone number and address of your company.

Below that, we see an option for Time Zone. The default is set to the Pacific time zone, so we want to adjust it to the correct time zone for the primary location of your company.

This will be important in order to track the correct date and time any time a user adds something or makes changes to any records in Salesforce. Then, click Save.

This screen has some useful information on it if you ever need to reference it.

You can see your organization's ID here and how many licenses of each type are being used.

Now, if your company uses the calendar year for your accounting records, you're set. But if you use a fiscal year, then click here and you can update it from this page.

We'd recommend the standard fiscal year feature. Once you make the change, just click Save.

There are other options here, and you're free to explore, but we're not covering them in this course.

Now, let's set up some branding. Type "Branding" in the Quick Find box and click Themes and Branding.

Then click New Theme.

Enter your company's name in the Theme Name box, and then just click in the API Name box and it will autofill.

Note that this API Name box will appear frequently in Salesforce as you go through various Setup functions, and it will always automatically populate.

Now let's upload our logo. We downloaded our Rocket Shop logo earlier, so I'll get it from the Downloads folder.

Once uploaded, we can adjust the size if needed and then click Save.

Then you can change the brand color as well if you'd like. After that, you can change the page background and global header background, although we recommend neutral colors here.

After that, click Save.

Now, you've created it, but you haven't made it active yet. Click on Themes and Branding again, and you'll see your new theme.

Click on the drop-down arrow to the far right and select Activate.

Now your company logo and branding colors will always appear in Salesforce.

The last thing we want to do is turn on some account settings.

Type "Account Settings" into the Quick Find box and then click on it. Click Edit in the middle.

Now, we suggest keeping these top four boxes checked, and if they're not checked, then check them.

View Hierarchy will show your parent-child relationships with your accounts.

Enabling the news will give your users a news feed for the latest news articles on the web about your accounts.

Automated Account Fields will make suggestions for your users as they enter new accounts, and Enable Account Logos will display company logos on your records if they're available.

Then, in the next section, we want this box checked as well. This will allow users to relate contacts to multiple accounts, which we will cover in a later lesson.

The only one to leave unchecked is the last one, to allow customer support to enable Person Accounts. That's solely for a B2C, or business-to-consumer, model, which this course does not cover.

Now go ahead and click Save.

And that's it for the basic company settings. It's really not all that much, as it turns out. No point in spending too much time on areas you don't need to.

We'll get to a lot more as we go through the rest of this course.

See you soon.