How We Helped Clear Remove 6 Years of Salesforce Technical Debt — And What Comes Next

Clear has always moved fast. In just a few years, they’ve grown from a promising startup to one of India’s leading fintech platforms — helping over 5 million people file their taxes and more than 600,000 businesses stay compliant with GST and other regulations. Growth like that brings constant change: new customers, new products, new markets, and new processes almost every month.

When they reached that stage, Salesforce was the obvious choice. For companies with complex operations, Salesforce isn’t just a CRM — it’s the central nervous system of the business. It can be shaped to match exactly how the company runs, ensuring every team, from sales to support, works in sync.

But the very strength of Salesforce — its flexibility — is also its biggest challenge. To make it truly work across an entire organization, it has to be heavily customized and configured. And these changes are never one-off. Every tweak to a business process means a tweak in the CRM. Every new idea means new automation, new fields, and sometimes new code.

Over time, these layers of changes build up. The system becomes as complex as the company itself. And just like a fast-growing business needs constant attention to stay healthy, the CRM needs constant manual oversight just to keep the lights on.

The Broader Problem with Salesforce

This isn’t unique to Clear. In the last two decades, enterprise software like Salesforce, SAP, Workday, and ServiceNow has become the backbone of business. But beneath the software sits an invisible services layer — the armies of consultants, implementers, and admins required to make it actually work.

For every $1 a company spends on Salesforce licenses, they spend $5–$6 on services. That’s about $66 billion annually on Salesforce services alone. And yet, across industries, executives still ask the same questions:

• Why does a small change take six weeks?

• Why does my $100K Salesforce investment cost me $600K in services?

• Why do automations break with every upgrade?

• Why is the ROI still unclear?
  
  
  

The traditional services model is slow, expensive, and inconsistent. That’s the problem Ressl AI was built to solve with AI-powered Salesforce implementation agents that deliver outcomes at 20x speed and 25% of the cost.

The Challenges Clear Faced

Clear’s in-house Salesforce team is world-class. But like any high-performing team in a fast-moving company, they were always busy:

• Delivering new features to support growth

• Handling a steady stream of change requests from multiple teams

• Running experiments to stay ahead of the competition

• Implementing Salesforce’s monthly feature releases
  
  
  

Over six years, this relentless pace left little room to deal with the old, hidden issues in the system. The result was a growing mountain of technical debt:

• Unused fields, layouts, and permission sets

• Overly complex automation logic that was difficult to maintain

• Hard-coded values that made changes brittle

• Legacy components that no longer matched current processes

These issues slowed deployments, created maintenance headaches, and made the CRM harder for users to navigate.

How Ressl AI Tackled It

We partnered with Clear on two major initiatives:

1. Clearing the Org of Technical Debt

Our audit identified dozens of areas where the system could be simplified, modernized, or secured. We removed unused configurations, replaced brittle hard-coded logic, updated outdated automation tools, and consolidated redundant components.

Impact:

• Stronger security posture

• Faster deployments with fewer failures

• Cleaner, more intuitive user experience

• Reduced maintenance effort for the in-house team

• Alignment with Salesforce best practices and upcoming platform changes
  
  
  

2. Running a Functional Audit

We mapped every business process inside the Salesforce org and documented it in detail. This gave Clear a clear, accurate picture of how their CRM was being used — the first step toward improving productivity and maximizing ROI. We’ll share more on this in our next article.

Measurable Results

By using Ressl AI, Clear achieved results that would normally take months in just weeks:

• 80% faster technical debt cleanup

• $80K+ saved in estimated consulting costs

• Over 500 hours of internal team capacity freed up in the first quarter

• Thousands of unused metadata elements removed, reducing org clutter significantly

Why It Worked

Ressl AI’s platform ingests all Salesforce metadata, encodes it into a proprietary graph structure, and gives our AI agents the context they need to act. With a library of reusable Salesforce workflows and a human-in-the-loop quality control process, our agents can execute cleanup, optimization, and documentation at a superior speed and consistency.

We handle configuration, code, documentation, and testing autonomously. Every client makes the system smarter, and every project builds reusable templates for the future.

What’s Next for Clear and Ressl AI

With the technical debt cleared and the functional audit complete, the next phase of our work together will focus on:

• Streamlining and optimizing business processes identified during the audit

• Automating repetitive workflows with AI agents

• Deploying reusable templates for recurring needs like lead routing, renewal opportunity creation, and approval flows

• Setting up continuous monitoring to prevent new technical debt from accumulating

Our goal is simple: to make Clear fall more in love with their Salesforce — and keep it that way.