Approach for storing historical records and tracking changes

Question

New to salesforce. I have a custom object Publisher that is related to the Account object. Whenever an Publisher is changed for an account I would like to keep an history of who the old Publisher was for the account and perform a few clean up actions. To that extent I thought of the following steps. Would be great if someone could point out any issues with this approach or is this the standard approach.

1. Create a custom object called PublisherHistory with Account, Publisher, DateArchived (and other related fields)
2. Create a trigger on upsert of the Account object
3. Whenever the publisher on the account object changes create a entry for a custom object PublisherHistory
4. Perform other actions

Is this an approach that is recommended. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You can enable fieldHistory Tracking which will do this work for you. You don't need a new object or trigger for this.

If you still need to create custom objects as you want to link that with multiple objects in that case trigger is a good solution. Although you need to compare old and new values to not fire it unnecessary.

For your "other actions" You might need a trigger/WF/Process builder.