Working with Person Accounts in Salesforce.com
June 22nd, 2010
Out of the box (so to speak), Salesforce.com is a B2B product. But what if your company provides home healthcare services or lawn care services or any other type of service for individual consumers. You don’t hear alot of talk about it but Salesforce.com can be tweaked for this scenario using “Person Accounts”.
By default, Person Accounts are not enabled. You’ll need to call support to have them enabled and they will repeatedly ask you if you really want to do this and if you understand the consequences. Once enabled, Person Accounts cannot be disabled. I would recommened you enable a Developer Edition first and test out your solution there before enabling your Produciton Org.
So what actually happens when you enable Person Accounts and what are the consequences? The Salesforce.com Help has alot of good info on Person Accounts but I wanted to dig in and really see what was happening in the background. In most situations, you can use person accounts as if they were contacts. You can include them in all contact list views except the Recent Contacts list on the contacts home page. So when Person Accounts are enabled you’ll see a new set of menu items under Setup -> App Setup -> Customize -> Accounts
You can configure Person Account page layout like you would any other type of page layout. You’ll need to go and assign the new record type to each of the profiles that need access to it.
Once you’ve done they you will be able to create accounts for Business and Personal record types. When you click the “New” Account button you’ll receive a picklist asking you which type to create:
So what happens when you create a new Person Account. So a Person Account is a combination of both an Account and Contact record. When Person Accounts are enabled, the following fields are added to the Account object:
- FirstName
- LastName
- IsPesonAccount
- Languages_pc
- Level_pc
- PersonAssistantName
- PersonAssistantPhone
- PersonBirthdate
- PersonContactId
- PersonDepartment
- PersonEmail
- PersonEmailBouncedDate
- PersonEmailBouncedReason
- PersonHomePhone
- PersonLastCURequestDate
- PersonLastCUUpdateDate
- PersonLeadSource
- PersonMailingCity
- PersonMailingCountry
- PersonMailingPostalCode
- PersonMailingState
- PersonMailingStreet
- PersonMobilePhone
- PersonOtherCity
- PersonOtherCountry
- PersonOtherPhone
- PersonOtherPostalCode
- PersonOtherState
- PersonOtherStreet
- PersonTitle
- RecordTypeId
- Salutation
The following fields are not available for Person Accounts:
- Parent Account
- View Hierarchy
- Reports To
You can go to the Person Account page layout and add these fields to the page layout. However, you cannot add the Contacts related list to the page layout. The Partner related list is available though so you can related Person Accounts to one another..
So when you create a new Person Account records, Salesforce.com creates not only a Account record but a Contact record in the background. You cannot access the account record directly (it always relocates you back to the Account record) but it is needed for the functionality that requires a contact (emails, customer portal, etc.). Here’s what the records look like from SOQL:
Account
Contact
Some other things to take into consideration for Person Accounts include:
- Person Accounts can be associated with activities using either the Name or Related To fields.
- Person Accounts can be invited to group events and requested meetings.
- Person Accounts can be added to campaigns and have a Campaign History related list.
- For cases, Person Accounts can be entered in the Account Name field, the Contact Name field, or both.
- You can add Person Accounts to the Contact Roles related list on cases, contracts, and opportunities.
- Custom objects with relationships to either accounts or contacts can be added as related lists on Person Accounts.
- Person Accounts can be enabled as users for your Customer and Self-service portals.
- Person Accounts are currently supported in Connect Offline and Connect for Outlook version 3.2 and later. They are not currently supported in Connect for Lotus Notes.
- You can send individual emails and mass emails to Person Accounts.
- For field history, Account fields for Person Accounts can be tracked using the account field history settings, but contact fields for Person Accounts are configured on the contact field history settings page.
- Person Accounts have an unique import wizard so make sure you check the Salesforce.com Help for more info.
- Leads with a blank Company field are converted to Person Accounts. The default Person Account record type for your profile is applied to the new Person Account.
- You cannot add a contact formula field that references the account object to Person Accounts page layouts.
- Contact sharing is not available if you have enabled Person Accounts. The organization-wide default for contacts is set to Controlled by Parent and is not editable.
- If your organization has customized your contact sharing settings and you want to enable Person Accounts, change your organization-wide default for contacts to Controlled by Parent, which removes all your contact sharing rules and manually shared contacts.
- Person Accounts count against both account and contact storage because the API considers each Person Account to consist of one account as well as one contact.
- Creating or editing a Person Account triggers account workflow rules.
For more details on Person Accounts, check out the Tip sheet: Tips & Hints for Person Accounts and the Salesforce.com Help in general.
Categories: Salesforce
Great article Jeff, a much needed thorough review of this features. This information ought to be in the force.com wiki, it’s a must-read for any Admin considering them. I’ve been running two orgs with PersonAccounts and heavy customization for the past year. Here’s an oddball consideration to add to your list: The PersonEmail field is not accessible from Workflow Email Alerts built on Accounts. We solved it by populating a custom email field with workflow.
Thanks for talking about this sensitive subject. Those of us who suffer from PersonAccounts Syndrome appreciate the recognition.
My pleasure! Great tip on the PersonEmail field and workflow. There are always those tiny little “issues” that make these types of tweaks challenging.
“Leads with a blank Company field are converted to Person Accounts.”
How do you create a Lead with a blank Company field ?
It is required field …
Rup
My guess is it is via the Data Loader (or some other import process) or possibly Web to Lead and then the conversion process.
Actually no, when Person Accounts are enabled, the System Administrator can lift the requirements of Company on the Lead Page. Then is uses the logic of IF(Company=”", Account Record Type type=Person Account, Account Record Type type=Business). If company is required, and a lead submits information without their company name Salesforce enters in [not provided] for the company name. I do not think you can upload leads without mapping the company field (or mapping the company field to a blank field on the .csv file) successfully.
FYI – from the user guide it claims “Connect for Lotus Notes version 3.2 and later supports person accounts if they have been implemented in your organization.”
When you say it is not supported, do you just mean SF won’t provide technical support?
@Jeff, I don’t think Lotus Connect works with People Accounts. May want to call support to make sure.
when using a SaleForce partner Email marketing application such as SilverPop or ExactTarget for a mass email campaign, would Person Account be considered as an Acccount or a Contact for mapping to the fields in the email app. They seem to recognize Accounts and contacts but see a person account as an unrecognizable entity for email marketing. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
@Sharon, I think you will need to contact those vendor and ask them specifically. They may or may not support Person Accounts. I know a number of products that specifically state that they do not support Person Accounts.
Hi, I had a question regarding the use of Person Account. As I understand, the Person Accounts are used for B2C. In fact the person accounts are actually individual customers or Contacts.
In such a case, why do we need a separate person account? Instead of person account, we can directly use Contacts.
If there is an argument that how would we differentiate between contacts of Consumer Accounts and Contacts who themselves are consumers, we can do this by differentiating their ‘type’. We can create opportunities, orders, cases, etc. for both Person Accounts as well as Contacts… so in effect, we do not need person accounts.
It just adds to the complexity.
I acknowledge that there might be some reasons for having person accounts which are, at this point, oblivious to me.
Can you please help me with this? Or am I correct in my statement.
Ady
Hi Jeff. Good to see this good summary. I have implemented person accounts now for a number of orgs and I was just searching the blogs for a suggestion on creatiging a separate tab for person accounts. Any Ideas on how to do that and the implcations of doing it? In this particular case I want a tab for Students, and the accounts tab will always be used for company records
Jeff, I am setting up my a person account implementation for a client and your summary has been very helpful! Thanks!
Jeff, you should check out Match My Email. It automatically integrates email from any Inbox to Person Accounts in Salesforce.com.
A very late comment, but I think I spotted a typo: “You cannot access the account record directly (it always relocates you back to the Account record) ” Shouldn’t it be “You cannot access the _Contact_ record directly…”?
Jeff, what would be equally valuable would be an analysis of the pros and cons of building in the person account mode. To my understanding Salesforce is not really doing much development on the person account side of the house. If you are a B2C company the person account route sounds like a very logical decision. However, it is a little more complicated as you have to assess the long term development implications, especially if you are a complex organization with multiple objects. There are a series of limitations the person account model brings with it and understanding those completely would I believe ensure folks don’t go down a path that seems logical but has limitations. (Such as the ease of adding AppExchange plugins). A brief pros and cons list would add to this incredibly insightful article. Thanks for sharing.
Another tip:
For some business reason I need to pick the contact behind PAs and update some fields (from PA to the Contact). While querying for Contacts, if I include AccountId in the fields, I cannot update those instances later. I got (FATAL_ERROR|System.DmlException: Update failed. First exception on row 0 with id 003…; first error: INVALID_FIELD_FOR_INSERT_UPDATE, Account: bad field names on insert/update call: AccountId: [ AccountId]). This doesn’t happen when I don’t have AccountId in the query.
So I did a new Contact(Id = contactFromQuery.Id); and updated the new Contact instance instead
But does anyone know why I wasn’t allowed to update Contact?
Hi Jeff,
Where does the Languages_pc field come from ?
Rup
Aditya, person accounts ≠ contacts. Person accounts are a hybrid between accounts and contacts, combining fields from both. “Account Name” is a required field on Contacts. If you wanted to use Contacts by themselves, you would need to create some sort of dummy account record to go along with them.
“You cannot add a contact formula field that references the account object to Person Accounts page layouts.”
Is this still true?
Hi Jeff. Can (normal B2B) accounts have person accounts related list?
Unfortunately no. You org either uses Person account or does not. You can’t mix and match.