Organization Setup includes a wide range of largely global (impacts all users) settings that will influence how your Salesforce environment operates, including:
Org ID and Edition
Licensing Information
Language, Locale, and Currency
Critical Updates
Fiscal Year
Business Hours and Holidays
Monitoring Storage Usage
Monitoring API Usage
… and more

We’ll be going into detail on each of these.

API is an abbreviation for application programming interface. APIs allow external programs to interact with Salesforce data. Common examples of API usage include the Data Loader, integrations, and desktop applications such as Salesforce for Outlook.

API usage can be monitored in company information, and is limited within a 24-hour period (whereas standard website usage is not limited).  API usage limits depend on which edition of Salesforce you are using and how many user licenses you have.

Data storage is impacted by the number of records (leads, accounts, etc.) in your environment.

File storage is impacted by the file attachments (Chatter files, Content, Documents, etc.) in your environment.

Storage usage can be monitored in company information.

Business hours and holidays are configured so that cases are only escalated during the working hours of support personnel.

If your company has a fiscal year that does not match the standard calendar year (for example, Salesforce.com’s fiscal year starts in February), then you will want to configure fiscal years so that forecasting, quotas, and reporting align.

For example, selecting a date filter ‘Current FY’ on an opportunity report is influenced by fiscal year configuration (whereas calendar year and calendar quarter are not).

Changing fiscal year configuration can result in data loss.

Standard fiscal years have 4 quarters, 3 months per quarter; the administrator can configure the start or end month of a standard fiscal year.

Custom fiscal years allow fiscal quarters to be determined by week, instead of by month; custom fiscal years should only be used when standard fiscal years are inadequate.

Once enabled, custom fiscal years cannot be disabled. Custom fiscal years have fairly significant implications for developers and AppExchange package compatability; make sure they are truly needed before enabling.

The language settings page determines which languages can be selected when adding or modifying a user.  Note that languages cannot be disabled if currently in use by a user.

Currency locale is configured org-wide unless multiple currencies is enabled.  This setting determines the formatting of currency fields (e.g. currency symbol and related formatting), but does not impact the numeric values (in the example below, 500 USD becomes 500 GBP – the numeric value remains 500).

Notice the difference between English (United States) – USD and English (United Kingdom) – GBP.

When starting with a new Salesforce org, only one currency is enabled.

Multiple currencies can be enabled by contacting Salesforce, and allows for static conversion rates between currencies.

Advanced Currency Management (ACM) enables administrators to configured dated exchange rates (e.g. use the exchange rate at the opportunity’s close date instead of a static rate).

ACM can only be enabled if multiple currencies is enabled.

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