Troubleshoot Changing Account Owner Issues

Checking for a pattern

The first diagnostic step is to check for any pattern related to the behavior. While not an exhaustive list, these questions can help isolate the issue:

• Is this only happening to one user, or all users? Anyone from a specific profile or role?
• Does it occur only on specific accounts, or on all accounts?
• Do the affected accounts share any similarities (such as all owned by the same user)?
• Does the issue only occur when changing record owner from User A to User B, or is it any user to any user, or any user to User B, etc.?
• Does this issue only occur through the UI, or does it also happen when changing owner through the API, such as through workbench or data loader?

Checking for access

Next it should be determined whether or not the user attempting to change the Account’s owner has all of the requisite permissions:

• The user performing the transfer needs to have “Transfer Record” on their profile or through a permission set
• The user that is receiving ownership of the account needs at least “Read” on the Account object
• It is possible by changing ownership, the user making the change will lose Read on the record being transferred as it goes to the new owner, based on sharing settings. This will present the user with an error message, but the change will be successful and this message can be ignored.

Additionally, the sharing button can be used to determine current level of access to the Account record in question.

Checking for automation

Running debug logs with levels set as fine as possible is instrumental in identifying if there is a workflow, process, flow, trigger, validation rule, etc. that could be blocking the ownership change.

If the error message presented to the customer appears to be non-standard in any way, the culprit is most likely a custom validation rule, or an addError() method within a trigger. Debug logs will identify if the error is due to a validation rule. To check for the error message within a trigger (which could be on Account, Opportunity, Case, etc.), follow these steps:

1. As an admin, log in to the org
2. Click the Setup cog in the upper right, and then Developer Console
3. In the developer console, click Edit>Search In Files
4. Copy/Paste all or a portion of the error message into the search bar, then click the magnifying glass to begin the search.
5. If the error message is coming from a trigger or class, then the search results will display specifically which trigger/class as well as the line number.

Checking for related record issues

When clicking the change owner button from within the UI, the user is presented with numerous checkboxes, including “Transfer open opportunities owned by others”. Encourage the user to try various combinations of these buttons (or unchecking them all) to see if the owner change goes through. If it does, the issue has successfully been isolated to a specific type of related record.

Next, clone the record itself, and then try to transfer the clone. Again, if the change goes through on the clone, this means there is no issue with changing the Account Record’s owner, but that there is at least one related record that is blocking the change on the original record.