Learn About Regional Settings

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Describe how configuring your company settings affect your end users.
Translate the company’s business requirements into your company settings.
Implement changes to your company information and fiscal year.
Update your personal locale settings.

What Are Company Settings?

Have you ever wanted to assume an alternate identity? Whether your intentions are good, bad, or morally murky (hey, we don’t judge), securing counterfeit passports, facial reconstructive surgery, and a back story is tricky. Changing your company settings in Salesforce is far easier.

Spy with multiple passports.

Your company settings are the collection of information about your organization. This collection is mostly captured when you purchase a Salesforce product, but you can update the settings if your company moves operations or expands globally. It’s essentially a snapshot of your company’s identity. To bring a touch of international intrigue to the topic, let’s help Mom & Pop’s Spy Shop understand what their company settings encompass and update them as their situation changes.

But first, let’s break down what the company settings consist of.

		Details	For Example
Company Information	Name and Address	Used for billing and support	Mom & Pop’s Spy Shop 7 Wink Nudge Drive Frisco, CA 94101
	Primary Contact	Also for billing and support	John Doe
	Default Locale	Updating this one setting determines the way a ton of information is displayed within Salesforce (More on this later)	English (United States)
	Default Currency	Currency applied to records	English (United States) USD
	Currencies	List of all currencies used in the org	USD only
	Storage Used	Those cat pics pile up fast!	27.3 GB (11%)
	Licenses Available	Includes Salesforce and feature licenses	Salesforce Platform: 14 of 15 used
Fiscal Year	Fiscal Year	Used in reporting and forecasting	Standard, starting January
Support Information	Business Hours	These are used when escalation rules do their escalating	Mon to Fri, 8AM to 8PM
	Holidays	Days that cases skip escalation	June 27 (International Day of Mystery)

OK, But What Are Locale Settings?

Displaying information to your users in a familiar way improves users’ Salesforce experience and makes them more efficient secret agents. The Salesforce locale settings determine the display formats for date and time, user names, addresses, and commas and periods in numbers. As the admin, you set the default locale, but your users can set a personal locale if they’re based in a different location. We cover both these settings later, but let’s first take a look at what is affected by updating the default or personal locale.

	Details	Example
Locale	Date and Time Format	mm/dd/yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy
	Number Format	1,000 or 1.000 for one thousand
	Name Order	Last, First or First Last
	Address Format	Country, Zip Code, State, then Street
	Phone Number Format	(123) 456-7890 or +12 2345 67-0
Language	All Text	Standard tabs and fields
	Online Help	Text language in Help
Time Zone	Event Start/End Time	Calendar entries and events
	Date or Time Fields

Follow Along with Trail Together

Want to follow along with an expert as you work through this step? Take a look at this video, part of the Trail Together series.

Update Your Company Information

Good news! After years of diligent undercover work, Mom & Pop’s Spy Shop was acquired by one of the biggest and best-funded firms, Nacho Secrets Agency. Let’s look at how to update your company settings after you relocate and merge financial systems.

Create a new Trailhead Playground for this module. Using an existing org might create problems when you check the challenge (and might even trigger the robot revolution).Click the dropdown arrow next to the Launch your hands-on org button, and choose Create a Trailhead Playground.

Launch your Trailhead Playground.
Click the setup gear and select Setup.
In the Quick Find box, enter Company Information and select Company Information. This page displays your org’s address, locale, time zone, currency, and lets you view storage used and licenses.
Click Edit.
Update the information related to your new location:

Address:

Street: 007 Cipher Cl
City: London
Zip/Postal Code: EC2N 2DB
Country: United Kingdom

Locale Settings:

Default locale: English (United Kingdom)
Default Time Zone: (GMT +00:00) Greenwich Mean Time

Click Save.

Notice other settings you could have changed? You learn about currency settings in the next unit. But next, check out how to update fiscal year:

From Setup, in the Quick Find box, enter Fiscal Year, then select Fiscal Year.
Change the Fiscal Year Start Month to July.
Note: You can also opt to change whether the fiscal year is based on ending or starting month or configure a completely custom fiscal year.
Keep the other settings and click Save and then OK.

Update Your Personal Locale

As you now know, the Company Information page includes your company’s default locale, language, and time zone. But employees outside of headquarters can choose their own locale settings to match their situations. And locale doesn’t just cover location—imagine a Portuguese-speaking user who lives in Oregon State, but works with customers in Brazil. Let’s look at how you update personal settings so that a user’s needs, even if different from the company locale settings, can be accommodated.

In the header, click your profile icon and select Settings.
In the Quick Find box, enter Language then select Language & Time Zone.
From this Settings area, the user selects the Time Zone, Locale, and Language that match their situation. For this example, select the Pacific time zone, English (United States) locale, and Portuguese language.
Note: Don’t do this now or your Salesforce org will display all UI in Portuguese. (Unless of course you speak Portuguese, and then go for it!)
If multicurrency is enabled and configured (more on that in the next unit) you can also set the personal currency here—in this case the Brazilian Real.
Click Save.

Changing times can call for a slight or severe identity change. Fortunately, your company information and personal locale are quickly updatable no matter where a mission takes you. Next, learn how to control and update currencies to take operations global.

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