A key way to control the cost of Salesforce is by managing your data footprint. Keeping your data storage as low as possible is no easy feat.

Salesforce.com is a powerful CRM solution that can be configured to manage or track just about every facet of your business. It is also a business in and of itself, though, which means that it isn’t free. You pay for Salesforce.com, and you pay to configure it, and you pay to integrate it with other apps and services. With this layer-cake of costs at play, it behooves you to pay close attention to each piece and ensure that every cost is minimized and justifiable.

A key way to control the cost of Salesforce is by managing your data footprint. Keeping your data storage as low as possible is no easy feat. You want to store every bit of that valuable customer information because you love in-depth, comprehensive reporting and tracking. We get it. But if your business is booming to the extent that you’re hitting Salesforce.com’s storage cap and re-upping on the additional data storage blocks every month, your margins will suffer and your finance department will sternly encourage you to find a way to reduce costs.

Here’s a quick breakdown:

  • Most Salesforce.com editions include 10Gb of data storage (there are slight adjustments depending on user count and other factors)
  • Most records consume 2kb
    • There are exceptions to this. For instance, Person Account records consume 4kb, Campaigns consume 8kb, and Email Messages can run much higher based on how they’re built. (See more details here.)
  • Additional data storage can be purchased at $125 for 500mb per month

    Note: Data Storage covers objects and records, mostly. File Storage is metered entirely separately, and covers files, documents, assets, attachments, and more. Paying for additional Data Storage does not increase your File Storage limits.

While ten gigabytes of data storage may seem like a lot of room, you’d be surprised at how quickly that limit is reached in Orgs with high volume record activity. We definitely took notice when our customers shared with us the number of transactions they were processing each month. Some of our customers are running millions of transactions each month and, based on the various configurations, some of them were spending $0.10 per transaction on data overages. What does that look like in added costs once the 10Gb limit is reached?

Let’s say the configuration of an Org is very, very lean, resulting the fewest possible records created; an initial Chargent Order record and Chargent Transaction record, then another Transaction record per month for that order. The cost would look something like this:

  • 1,000,000 transactions (assuming 10,000 are initial Chargent Orders + Chargent Transactions, and the rest are Transactions against existing Chargent Orders) = 2,020mb of extra data storage needed each month.
  • At $125 for 500mb of additional data storage, that’s $505 per month, or $6,060 per year just to store their transactions. And if the admin of this Org isn’t offloading older payment data to a different storage solution, this is an ADDED cost per year, not static.

Our customers asked us to develop a solution to minimize these costs, something that would allow them to tokenize their customers’ payment information without creating two records each time, something to improve their margins and put smiles on their accountants’ faces.

Our Principal Technical Architect, Eric Alexander was inspired by the headless software initiatives like Headless Java and Headless Linux. He started working on a way to enable Chargent customers to process payments in a similarly low footprint manner.

The idea was simple: a headless tokenization component that allows our customers to quickly tokenize payment data via a configurable user interface anywhere within their Salesforce.com environment. We call it Zero Footprint Tokenization.

Eric didn’t want this solution to be cumbersome to implement, so he built it as a Lightning Component that can be placed within a Lightning App, or even within our customers’ own Lightning Components. Easy setup, no additional record creation, and no added data storage costs.

Are you trying to solve the data storage problem in your Org? Our Zero Footprint Tokenization does just that. Ask us about it today. We’re always happy to help.