The Definitive Guide to Salesforce Person Accounts

Person Accounts are one of the core features of the Salesforce platform that most often generates confusion. Herein we’ll try to demystify some of the misconceptions about this feature. 

Resources from Salesforce:


What is a Person Account? (Plain English, Please) 

A Person Account is an object that combines fields from the standard Account and Contact objects. When you create a Person Account record, the data is still stored in separate Account and Contact records “under the hood” of the Salesforce runtime. But in the user interface, you see a single, unified record. 

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The field combination can be visualized as shown in the image below. 

 

Why Would I Use Person Accounts?

Person Accounts were designed to support B2C business processes. They are used to model individuals (people) when there is not a reliable or relevant means of modeling a parent account entity.

User Benefits

Because they appear to users as a single record in the Salesforce UI, it can feel like a more “natural” way to interact with a B2C record. Unfortunately, Person Account results still appear in both the Account and Contact lists of global search results.

Admin Benefits

  • Better for Community self-registration (only one “record” to enable as user)
  • Cannot register for Partner Communities, however
  • Easier administration of custom fields, record types, page layouts, etc.

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What Do I Need to Know Before Enabling Person Accounts?

Salesforce maintains a list of considerations before enabling Person Accounts. Following is a condensed list of some of the high priority considerations: 

  • Encrypting some Account fields encrypts the equivalent Contact fields, and vice versa.
  • Geocoding of Person Account addresses is not available (without writing a custom integration).
  • Leads that don’t have a value in the `Company` field automatically convert to person accounts.
  • Marketing Cloud integration requires more complex configuration.
  • Sharing must be adjusted so that Contact is either Controlled by Parent, or Account and Contact are both Private.
  • Storage - many people believe that a Person Account is stored “under the hood” as a single record. To the contrary, an Account and Contact record is created for each Person Account in an org.  

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Frequent Misconceptions - a.k.a. It ain’t Easy Being a Person Account

Once We Enable Person Accounts We’re Stuck Using Them

As a feature, Person Accounts can’t be disabled (yet - safe harbor). However, because the feature is exposed as a record type like any other, access to them can be removed from the user experience at any time. Additionally, converting a Person Account to a business account is as easy as updating each record’s recordType, which will automatically create the appropriate Contact record for you. 

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Salesforce Is Phasing Out Support for Person Accounts

To the contrary, as of the Spring ‘18 release support for Person Accounts has been added to the Health and Financial Services Clouds, which are two of Salesforce’s growing industry vertical offerings. Salesforce has continued to enhance features around Person Accounts.

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Bottom Line - Should You Use Them?

PROS

  • If we were starting from scratch, this is absolutely the recommended data model for they way you may work with customers
  • No need to create an account for every contact
  • No orphan contacts if an account doesn’t get created
  • Storage: no different since already creating both contact and account

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CONS

  • Storage: no different since already creating both contact and account
  • Will need to review and update existing automations (Flows, Process Builders, Workflows, and Apex)
  • Will need to review update Rollup Helper (if used)
  • Will need to update documents generated with Salesforce data (queries, templates)
  • This would be true if using something like Conga Composer of DocuSign
  • Merge fields, in general, get complicated.  See Considerations for detail.
  • Will need to update Email templates
  • Causes some issues with certain integrations. Marketo, for example, doesn’t play great with Person Accounts. 
  • Marketing systems would need to be evaluated for compatibility with person accounts - and work would need to be done to prevent massive duplicates from being created
  • Can’t be ‘undone’. This primary is an issue for Admins who would see all of the fields created by enabling this feature.  These can be hidden from users.
  • There are some reporting limitations.
  • Will need to modify or rebuild every report running off contacts
  • When using Tasks with QuickCreate turned on, users only have the ability to create a new Contact from the Name lookup field. - would then want to consider creating automation to convert orphaned Contacts to Person Accounts.
  • Will need to assess all Contact lookups on other objects to see if they need to be switched to an Account lookup
  • Will need to recreate many fields currently on the Contact on the Account (Person Account)
  • Will need to retrain users on the new user interface and nuances for working with Person Accounts
  • Will need to export all contacts, manipulate data, and re-import as person accounts to convert
  • We’re probably looking at a significant investment to convert large volumes of contacts/accounts to Person Accounts. Possibly look at householding as an alternative

In conclusion, Person Accounts are a very powerful tool on many levels and should be considered when you have a heavy B2C focus on sales, service, commerce and marketing but often times, because they are so poorly understood by the Salesforce Ecosystems, they are avoided at all costs. We hope this article has helped you and if you have any questions feel free to contact us