Field governance lets you lock down and track changes to individual custom fields on Contacts, Accounts, or Opportunities. It's built for fields where an unexplained or accidental change is a real problem - compliance dates, financial figures, anything you need a clean record of. Franchise brand accounts have it pre-configured on their built-in compliance fields, but any account can turn it on for any custom field that needs the same level of scrutiny.
How to Turn On Field Governance for a Field
Field governance lives in the Field Governance section of the Create Custom Field or Edit Custom Field drawer, alongside the field's other settings.
Track changes to this field - every change to the field is recorded in the Change Audit Trail report.
Lock this field after first value is saved - once the field holds a value, only an admin can change it, and they have to provide a reason for the change.
These two settings work independently. A field can be tracked without being locked, giving you a change history without restricting who can edit it.
What Locking a Field Does
Once a locked field has its first value saved, editing it is restricted to admins. Any admin who changes it after that point has to supply a reason for the change before it saves. That reason, along with the before and after values, is what gets recorded for the field's history.
Where to Review Governance Changes
Every tracked field change is logged to the Change Audit Trail report, under Reports, Governance. You can filter by event category, event type, user, field, or record type, and search by a specific record ID.
Because this report covers every governed field account-wide, filtering by Field or Event type is what keeps unrelated changes out of view when you're reviewing a specific field's history.
Field Governance in Franchise Compliance
Franchise brand accounts use field governance behind the scenes on their built-in FDD and Franchise Agreement contract types - see the How to Use Contracts article for how the FDD Sent Date and FDD Receipt Date fields use locking and the resulting cooling-off period.