Timely and accurate information is vital in an effective Salesforce CRM system, and without it, business rules and governance cannot be easily applied. One way to achieve timely and the accurate information is to provide the means for certain users to update and manage control of information themselves.

In this recipe, we will create a custom object that records whether a country is unsuitable for trade by providing the means for non-system administrators, such as a trading or finance user, to mark a country as a trade-embargoed nation.

We will create a validation rule that checks the values in the country embargo custom object to ensure that whenever account records are created, the country codes are checked against the embargoed list. The country codes are entered using two letters, according to an international standard (ISO 3166) set by the International Organization for Standardization. For more information, visit the ISO site at https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#search.