A Tip A Day #17 – Upload Records with Inactive Owner

This post is a part of the daily blog series 

A Tip A Day, daily dosage of learning!

Day #17 – Upload Records with Inactive Owner

Recently I was migrating few old records into Salesforce using Data loader.  The upload csv file had of course Record Owner field referring to the User record.  I got the User record Id from Salesforce and mapped it to the Owner field.

While uploading, I got the error – “A record owner cannot be Inactive!”.  Apparently, few record owners are Inactive.  I cannot assign them to an active owner as these belong to an old owner who no longer is active since these are legacy system records.

Here’s the workaround.  Salesforce does give us the ability to assign a record to an Inactive owner but there are couple of settings that need to be set to be able to do so.

1. Setup –> User Interface

First, in the User interface settings, check the check box “Update Records with Inactive Owners” user permission.  Note that this is associated with “Set Audit Field upon Record creation” setting as well.  The Audit field setting allows you to set the Created Date of the newly created record to an old date (which is quite useful) while migrating old data to reflect the exact creation date.

2. Profile Permission OR Permission Set

Next, you need to give the same permission in the Profile level also.  If you don’t want to give all the users in a Profile with this permission, you can instead create a permission set with this particular permission and assign it to the users whom you want to give the ability to.

At the profile level, check the checkbox “Update Records with Inactive Owners” or in the permission set choose this permission.

Read all other tips of the blog series here – A Tip A Day, daily dosage of learning!