Symptom · one of six
Nobody can change anything
The system outlived the person who understood it. Below: what that means underneath, a check you can run yourself in about ten minutes, and what it costs to put right if the check confirms it.
Nothing on this page is sent anywhere. The check runs in your own org.
What it is
The system outlived the person who understood it
The consultant left, documentation never existed, and the admin is afraid to touch anything because nothing is traceable. Small changes stop being made, the system drifts from how the team works, and eighteen months later somebody proposes replacing it. This is the most expensive failure of the six and the easiest to avoid.
Confirm it yourself
How do you confirm this yourself?
Ask your admin to describe what happens when a lead converts. If the answer takes longer than two minutes or ends in uncertainty, nothing is documented.
You have this if the answer takes longer than two minutes or ends in uncertainty. If your org comes back the other side of that line, this is not your problem, and nothing on this page is worth buying to you. Finding that out costs nothing and takes ten minutes.
If the check confirms it
Architecture documented, admin trained, handover completed properly
Fixed price on a written scope, 55 hours at fifty euro an hour, about 3 weeks elapsed. Documentation and sixty days of support after handover are in the price rather than an addition.
€2,750 · 55 hours · 3 weeks
When it is bigger than a repair
When is this the org rather than one fault?
This one travels with changes breaking other things, and it is what that symptom becomes once the person who understood it leaves. If more than two of the six match at once, the pattern is usually one org that was never configured for how the company sells now, rather than several separate faults. That is an implementation, not a repair, and it is priced the same way: hours multiplied by fifty.
Asked often enough to answer here
Questions
Is replacing the org cheaper than documenting it?
Almost never, and the proposal usually appears because nobody can describe what the current one does. A replacement inherits the same undocumented decisions, made again by different people, and the second system drifts the same way.
What does documented actually mean here?
Every active flow with what it does and what breaks if you change it, every custom field with who writes to it and who reads it, and the decisions with the reason each was made. Written so somebody who has never seen the org can change it safely.
Serhii Skrypnyk · Senior Salesforce Administrator and developer · 7 Salesforce certifications · on the platform since 2018. Reviewed 22 August 2026.