Track Field History for more than 20 fields - Salesforce

All of us would have come across a situation when we need to track more than 20 fields for an object in salesforce. We have raised this Idea around 8 years ago in the success community. But sill it has't implemented by salesforce. But for now, we can achieve it partially with the following workaround.

Approach:

This approach uses a custom Text field which stores values of multiple other individual fields. Then enabling field history tracking of this field would allow you to track changes for multiple sets of other individual fields. Thus even though remaining within the count limit 20, yet track changes of more than 20 fields.

Let us in this example take “Account” object and apply the steps to track change in Account Name, Phone, Parent Account and Billing Address all together.

Steps:

Step 1: Add a new custom field.

Setup -> Customize -> Accounts -> Fields

Create a new Text (255) field “Track FieldHistory” (Or give any other name of your choice.)

Step 2: Create a workflow on Account object with the following:

Event: On Create/Update

Criteria: On any change of  Account Name, Phone, Parent Account and Billing Address

Action: Field Update

Set Track FieldHistory = Formula (Account Name: <Account Name> + Phone: <Phone> + Parent Account: <Parent Account> + Billing Address: <Billing Address>)

     Step 3: Enable Field History tracking for this combined field “Track FieldHistory”.