Record & Data Management in Sugar - November 2025

For November’s Social Club, we discussed data ownership, management, and maintenance, which are topics that every Sugar admin grapples with at some point. This session dug into real-world practices around security models, record ownership, deduplication, and cleaning up old data. A big thank you to Angel Magana for leading this session and fielding some great questions from the group.

Before diving into the technical side of things, we took a moment to celebrate some Sugar wins from the group in 2025. A few highlights include:

• New team members and transitioning roles
• Successful Sugar implementations, go-lives, and migrations
• Completion of key initiatives
• Improved visibility into processes and better management using Sugar

Thanks to everyone who shared their stories! It’s always inspiring to hear how you’re making Sugar work for your organizations!

Understanding Record Ownership and Security

Angel kicked off the discussion by explaining how data ownership in Sugar works. One common point of confusion is how record ownership is always handled at the individual record level, and relationships between records (like Accounts-Contacts) do not affect ownership or visibility.

Here’s how it breaks down:

• Ownership defines who is assigned to a record, which can be used for filtering, routing, and permissions
• Teams control who can see a record. Users must be on at least one team related to the record to access it
• Permissions (like edit or delete) are managed through roles, not teams

There are several ways to assign ownership, including:

• Manual assignment
• SugarBPM
• Logic Hooks
• Mass Update
• The Excel Plugin

You can also manage and plan for exceptions, such as temporary ownership or dual assignment, by adding user relationship fields or by adjusting team permissions. However, Angel noted that those setups can limit functionality like “My Records” filtering. For more information on reassigning records when users are deactivated or if they change roles, refer to the Reassigning Records guide.

Best Practices for Data Cleanup

We spent a good portion of the session talking about how to keep your Sugar instance clean and organized. Angel walked us through various tools and techniques to handle duplicate records, stale data, and unnecessary clutter.

Deduplication

Sugar has built-in duplicate checking when creating new records, but the criteria can be expanded via custom development. For example, a customer wanted to include the LinkedIn field in lead duplicate checks, which was enabled by a small customization.

Purging Deleted Records

Deleted records in Sugar are only flagged as "deleted" in the database, not removed completely. The Prune Database on 1st of Month scheduler clears those deleted records from the backend.

Archiving vs Deleting

The Data Archiver tool lets you move records into archive tables based on defined criteria (such as inactive accounts or old opportunities). It’s important to note that this only affects data, not attachments.

We also discussed a helpful example of setting up an automated 90-day cleanup of BPM process data to help reduce table size and improve system performance.

Other Cleanup Areas to Watch

• Activity Stream: Stores a social-style stream of record updates, but it can be deactivated or limited if you're not using it to better manage data.
• Audit Logs: Not the same as the activity stream, but also worth managing to prevent excessive data buildup.
• Backups: Sugar Cloud instances offer daily snapshot backups. Exporting these to your own data warehouse might be a smart move if you want longer retention.

Automations and Custom Solutions

We wrapped up the session by discussing a few automation options that can help make record management easier:

• Use custom schedulers to automate reassignment or cleanup tasks (e.g., move stale cases to a queue).
• Logic hooks and BPM can help streamline record handling and enforce consistency.
• When in doubt, lean on the community or documentation to validate your approach, as there’s usually more than one way to solve a problem in Sugar!

Another huge thanks again to Angel for walking us through these important concepts and sharing practical tips that anyone can apply.

Our next Social Club session is scheduled for December 11th, and we’ll be discussing Sugar Logic. In the meantime, if you have questions, feel free to post them in the Help Forums to discuss them with the entire SugarClub community.

Hope to see you in December!