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Manage Users and Data Access
Delete Users

Delete Users

While you can’t completely delete a user, you can deactivate a user’s account so they can’t log in to Salesforce.

Required Editions

Available in: both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience
Available in: Essentials, Contact Manager, Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, Developer, and Database.com Editions
User Permissions Needed
To deactivate users: Manage Internal Users

Salesforce lets you deactivate users, but not delete them outright. A user can own accounts, leads, and groups, and can be on multiple teams. Removing a user from Salesforce affects many processes in the org. After departure from the org, you obviously don’t want the user to retain access to their account. However, merely deleting a user can result in orphaned records and the loss of critical business information.

For these reasons, deactivating rather than deleting the user is the appropriate action to take. Deactivation removes the user’s login access, but it preserves all historical activity and records, making it easy to transfer ownership to other users. For situations where changing ownership to other uses must be done before deactivation, freezing the user prevents login to the org and access to the user’s accounts.

 
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