T I P S & H I N T S F O R PE R S O N AC C O U N T S

If your customers are individual clients rather than companies or institutions, person accounts allow you to effectively manage your client relationships in Salesforce. Special record types called person account record types make an account a person account.

Understanding Person Accounts

Person accounts represent individual consumers, while business accounts represent companies or institutions. Person accounts can have all of the fields found in business accounts, except for the following:

♦ Reports To♦ Parent Account♦ View Hierarchy

Person accounts combine the functionality of accounts with the functionality of contacts. For example, you can:

♦ Use contact fields and related lists on person account detail and edit pages♦ Associate person accounts with tasks and events using either the Name or

Related To fields♦ Invite person accounts to group events♦ Send individual and mass emails to person accounts♦ Add person accounts to campaigns♦ Convert leads into person accounts♦ On cases, enter person accounts in the Account Name field, the Contact

Name field, or both♦ Add person accounts to the Contact Roles related list on cases, contracts,

and opportunities♦ Enable person accounts as users of your organization’s Self-Service portal♦ Send individual and mass Stay-in-Touch requests to person accounts♦ Include person accounts in contact list views (except the Recent Contacts

list on the Contacts home page)

Usage Notes→ Access person accounts on the Accounts tab. Note that your administrator may

have renamed the display label of this tab; if in doubt, the tab’s color scheme is always medium blue.

→ You can use person accounts if your administrator has enabled one or more person account record types on your user profile. For more information on record types, see the online help.

→ You may have multiple person account record types enabled, such as “Mortgage Clients,” “Banking Clients,” and “Insurance Clients.” You can change the record type of a person account only to another person account record type.

→ If the default record type for the Accounts tab is a person account record type, the Quick Create fields in the sidebar include First Name and Last Name instead of Account Name.

→ Leads with a blank Company field are converted automatically to person accounts. The default person account record type for your profile is applied to the new person account. Similarly, leads with a value in the Company field are converted to business accounts.

→ When searching, person accounts appear only in account search results. → Person accounts appear in both account and contact list views. Add the Is

Person Account icon to your personal list views to visually differentiate person accounts from other records, and to include or exclude person accounts in a list.

→ You can merge person accounts only with other person accounts.→ When selecting the columns to include in a report, person account fields are

included wherever account fields are available.

Term Usage

In the Salesforce documentation and online help, the word "account" by itself always refers to both business accounts and person accounts. The terms "business account" and "person account" are used when there are differences between the two kinds of accounts.

Distinguishing Person Accounts from Business Accounts

In search results, lookup dialogs, and the Recent Items section of the sidebar column, person

accounts have a person icon ( ), while business accounts have a

folder icon ( ).

Tracking Person Account Relationships

Person accounts do not have a Contacts related list; however, you can use the Partners related list to track relationships between different person accounts.

Person Accounts for the Customer Portal

If a Customer Portal is enabled for your organization, then users with the "Edit Self-Service Users" permission can give person accounts access to your Customer Portal. For more information on enabling a person account for a Customer Portal, see the Salesforce online help.

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Importing Your Person AccountsYou can import person accounts that you own from an Excel (.csv) file using the Import My Person Accounts wizard.

Step 1: Launch the wizard1. Choose Setup |Import | Import My Person Accounts, or click Import

My Person Accounts in the Tools area of the Accounts home page.2. For best results, perform all of the steps provided on the introductory page.3. Click Start the Import Wizard! to begin your import.

Step 2: Prevent duplicate records1. Choose the field you are using to match existing records in Salesforce with

records in your import file. The External ID option is disabled if no external ID fields have been created for your records.

2. Choose what you want to happen if matches are found - only import new records, only update existing records, or update existing records and import new ones. If you have chosen to match by Salesforce ID, you can only update existing records; you cannot import new ones.

3. Click Next.

Step 3: Select record type1. Choose the record type you want to assign to the records in your import file. 2. If you are inserting new records and updating existing records at the same

time, then choose whether to override the record types of existing records. 3. Click Next.

Step 4: Upload your import file1. Click Browse... to provide the location of your import file.2. Choose the character encoding of your import file. In most cases, you can

accept the default value.3. Make additional settings depending on the setup of your organization, such

as whether workflow rules will be triggered and the language of the records in the import file.

4. Click Next.

Step 5: Map fields1. Map the fields in your import file with the appropriate Salesforce fields by

matching the fields on the left, which includes all the columns in your import file, with the appropriate Salesforce field on the right.

2. If the column labels in your import file exactly match field labels in Salesforce, the wizard automatically maps those fields for you; however, if two or more of your file's column labels are identical matches with a field in Salesforce, you must map the fields manually.

Note: Some Salesforce fields cannot be updated using import, for example, Created Date and Last Modified Date. So even though you may be using an exported report as your import file, some of the Salesforce fields in your file cannot be mapped.

3. Click Next. The import wizard warns you if you have not mapped all of the fields in your import file. Unmapped field values are not imported.

Step 6: Confirm and submit your import1. Read any warning messages that the import wizard displays. Optionally,

click Previous to return to earlier steps and resolve potential problems. 2. Click Import Now! to submit your import request to Salesforce. A message

indicates how long the import will take. When the import operation is done, a message from Customer Support is sent to the email address shown.

3. Click Finish to exit the wizard. 4. To monitor the status of your pending import, visit the import queue.

© Copyright 2000-2009 salesforce.com, inc. All rights reserved. Last Update: January 05, 2009