Summary:
Often, companies deal with many challenges due to records being owned by inactive users. While on the surface this may not seem like a big issue, it can have serious downstream implications, such as negatively impacting data integrity, posing as a security risk, cause ownership confusion, workflow and automation ineffectiveness, and inaccurate reporting
There are two main solutions to resolve this issue:
Export record data and reassign them to an Active User
Enable the Permission Set Setting "Set Audit Fields upon Record Creation" and "Update Records with Inactive Owners" User Permissions"
By enabling the system permission “Set Audit Fields upon Record Creation" and "Update Records with Inactive Owners' User Permissions”, records owned by an inactive user can be updated or re-assigned to an active user.
Step 1: Enable "Set Audit Fields upon Record Creation" and "Update Records with Inactive Owners" User Permissions
There is a special setting under Setup > User Interface that allows you to override these fields when a record owner is Inactive.
The permission is called Enable "Set Audit Fields upon Record Creation" and "Update Records with Inactive Owners" User Permissions
This setting, when checked (see above), provides users the ability to assign out this permission via a Permission Set to allow for the override to happen.
Step 2: Assign this permission via a Permission set to a set of users
Go to Setup > Permission Sets
Click New
Give it a title such as “Audit Fields Permission” and assign it to the Salesforce user License
Next in the newly created Permission Set, search for the permission that you just enabled
Add that Permission to the Permission Set
Next, assign users to that Permission set
Managed Assignments
Add the users you want to add to the Permission Set
Simultaneously, if you don't want to add specific users but to a profile then you would go to a Permission Set Group and add the permission set to the Permission Set Group
Now you will be able to Override the CreatedBy and CreatedDate field and Assign Records to an Inactive Owner.