How to answer 'who can see this record?' in five minutes
“Who can see this record?” is one of those questions that sounds like it should take a minute and instead eats an afternoon. The reason is that the answer lives in pieces: a profile here, a permission set there, a sharing rule, a group membership, a spot in the role hierarchy. Assemble them by hand and you are never quite sure you found them all.
Here is the fast way to get a complete, defensible answer.
1. Connect read-only
Connect your org with Salesforce OAuth. The connection only reads access-configuration metadata, never the contents of your records, so you can do this against production safely, or try it on a sandbox first.
2. Point at the record or field
Pick the specific record, object, or field you care about. The interesting questions are usually concrete: who can see this one opportunity, this regulated field, this internal-only object.
3. Read the “why”, not just the “who”
This is the part manual review misses. A list of names is not an answer; the answer is the reason each person has access. For every user who can see the thing, you want the specific grant: the profile, the permission set, the sharing rule, the group membership, or the role hierarchy. That is what makes the result something you can act on, and something you can hand to an auditor.
4. Fix the surprising parts
Most of the list will be exactly who you expected. A few entries will not be, and those few are the whole point. Now that you can see the path that grants the access, you know precisely what to change to close it.
Why five minutes beats five hours
The value is not just speed. It is completeness and confidence. Doing this by hand, you are always one forgotten layer away from a wrong answer. Reading every layer at once means the answer is whole the first time. That is what Who Sees What does: it turns a multi-screen investigation into a single, plain-language answer, with the reasons attached.
Ready to try it on a real question? Run a quick scan. Have a question about how Who Sees What works? Ask Horton, the assistant in the corner.