Best Practice Q: Should our sales staff be allowed to delete Opportunities?

Question

Context: I am an Engineer looking to create a 1-1 relationship between SFDC.Accounts and our own "customer accounts" in our internal system.

Question: During implementation, we have discovered that our SFDC staff users are allowed to delete SFDC.Opportunities (regardless of state - open/closed/etc).

This practice has far reaching implications for us personally, so I was just wondering if these was a common practice?

Motivations: Apparently, the most common reasons for this are:

• There was duplicate data and they are "cleaning" it up.
• Nothing prevents anyone from deleting a closed Opportunity that has real $$ associated to it.

Answer 1

This is not a common practice.

Ideally, System Admin usually maintain the data, including data cleansing. You can also prevent Sales person to delete opportunity (even if, those records created by that person).

You can define your business case, identify System Admin Profiled user who can have deletion permissions or modify all data permissions. and revoke unnecessary permissions from rest of the users.

Answer 2

If its about avoiding duplication in Accounts, you can use Merge Accounts option which helps us in not deleting(if any info) is available in the deleting account.

If its about deleting Opportunities, even that would lead to many misconceptions. Instead of deleting you can set a stage/Type which can be named as "Discard" which later can be deleted by an Admin in daily basis or batch/trigger to do the job od deleting.

Cause, every Opportunity would be counted like Opportunity in Open stage can be counted for In Pipeline Opportunities OR Opportunity with Closed stage would be considered in Actuals/Target or any other report which will give us a picture of closed Opp for that Month/Quarter.

My Opinion is that Deleting is not the only solution to avoid Duplication, especially in critical Objects like Accounts & Opportunities.