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The week before the holidays is a strange time. The office (or Slack channel) is quieter. The urgent emails have slowed down. You finally have a moment to breathe.
But while you’re clearing off your physical desk, what about your virtual one?
For many Salesforce Admins, 2025 was a year of “keeping the lights on.” You reacted to urgent requests, fixed what broke, and kept the data flowing. But if you want 2026 to be different and you want to move from “survival mode” to “strategy mode” you need a plan.
Resolution 1: “I Will Leave My Technical Debt in 2025”
We talk a lot about “technical debt” at Belmar, but what does it actually look like? It’s the field you created for a one-off event in 2019 that’s still visible on the Contact page. It’s the workflow rule that fires an email to an employee who left the company three years ago.
It is the clutter that makes your system slow and your users frustrated.
The downtime between Christmas and New Year’s is the perfect time for a deep “Winter Cleaning”. You don’t need to do a massive overhaul, but you can commit to these three clean-up tasks:
- The “Process Builder” Purge: If you are still holding onto Workflow Rules or Process Builders, 2026 is the year to let go. With Salesforce investing heavily in Flow (and the new Flow debugging tools in Winter ’26), maintaining legacy automation is a security risk and a performance drain.
- Archive, Don’t Hoard: Are you keeping data “just in case”? If your storage limits are flashing red, look into the new Salesforce Archive capabilities. You can move inactive records like applications from 2018 or one-time donors who haven’t engaged in 5 years to cold storage. They remain accessible for compliance, but they stop clogging up your daily reports.
- Run the “Optimizer”: It’s a free tool built right into Salesforce. Run it today. It will give you a scary (but necessary) list of unused reports, unassigned page layouts, and API version issues. Pick five items from that list to fix in January.
The Payoff: A faster Org, happier users, and a lot less scrolling to find the right field.
Resolution 2: “I Will Unlock the Features I’m Already Paying For”
The most tragic thing we see in our Health Checks is a client paying for a Ferrari and driving it like a scooter. Salesforce releases hundreds of new features every year. If you haven’t looked at the release notes since Summer ’24, you are missing tools that could save your team hours of manual work.
For 2026, commit to implementing at least one “Quick Win” from the Winter ’26 release:
For Our Nonprofit Friends:
- Fix Your Gift Entry: If your development team is dreading the post-holiday donation processing, turn on the enhancements to the Gift Entry Grid. The Winter ’26 update allows you to handle up to 200 rows of data at once, including soft credits and recurring gift commitments.
- Modernize Volunteer Management: Still using spreadsheets to track who is working the gala? The new Volunteer Management updates allow for automated initiative creation and “Smart Matching,” which pairs volunteers to shifts based on their skills and availability automatically.
For Our Public Sector Partners:
- Streamline Intake with Agentforce: The new Agentforce capabilities for Public Sector Solutions are game-changers for constituent service. Imagine an AI agent that can automatically screen complaints for jurisdiction or guide a constituent through a benefits eligibility check before a human caseworker ever opens a file.
- Licensing & Permitting Console: If your clerks are jumping between six tabs to approve a simple business license, look at the new Health Licenses and Permits console app. It centralizes the view so staff can see the application, the fee payment history, and the inspection status on a single screen.
The Payoff: You get to be the hero who gives your team time back in their day without spending a dime on new licenses.
Resolution 3: “I Will Stop Guessing and Start Predicting”
For the last decade, we used CRM to record what happened.
- “We received an application.”
- “We got a donation.”
- “We closed a case.”
In 2026, the resolution is to use Salesforce to tell you what will happen.
This is where the buzzwords you’ve been hearing Data Cloud services and AI actually hit the ground. But you can’t use AI if your data is siloed.
Make this the year you stop treating your data sources as islands. If you are a Nonprofit, your marketing data (email opens) needs to talk to your fundraising data (donations). If you are a Government Agency, your licensing data needs to talk to your inspection data.
Your roadmap for 2026 should include a pilot project for Data Cloud. Even if it’s small. By unifying your data, you build the foundation that allows Agentforce to say, “Hey, this donor usually gives in February, maybe we should email them now?” or “This building permit is likely to be rejected based on historical data, let’s flag it for review early.”
The Payoff: You move from being a “database administrator” to a “strategic advisor” for your leadership team.
How to Keep These Resolutions
We know how it goes. January 6th hits, the emails pile up, and these resolutions get buried under the “Urgent” pile.
Don’t let that happen.
The best way to stick to a roadmap is to have a partner who holds you accountable. Whether it’s helping you migrate those stubborn Process Builders, setting up your first Data Cloud segment, or just keeping your “To-Do” list manageable, Belmar is here to help.
One way to get help quickly and without making a big financial commitment is to engage Belmar through Hypercare Extend. Book a call today to talk to our team about how we can help.
Enjoy your well-deserved break. Rest up, unplug, and let’s hit the ground running in January.