Context: My understanding is that historically Salesforce was built to manage Business-to-Business (B2B) contacts, and the idea that the data model would not be built for contacts without accounts makes sense; meaning semantically viewing a business as an account makes sense, at least to me - and people do business with people through businesses.
Issue: That said, clearly some domains are not naturally built on the concept of requiring a contact to have an account - and Salesforce is no longer just used to manage B2B contacts.
Is there a existing natural way to deal with contacts without accounts that would not require custom fields, reports, etc?
Reason I ask is because currently, it appears that aside from resulting in a somewhat awkward rendering of data, reports, etc. -- forcing individuals to have accounts is currently doubling data usage per entities that are individuals.
Attribution to: blunders
Possible Suggestion/Solution #1
Person accounts are definitely the way to go on this and have been purposely designed for this B2C model (also works great with B2B).
Here are a couple blogs I wrote on the subject:
- Top Reasons your Association Should Use Person Accounts
- Salesforce CRM Person Accounts Facilitates Reporting Across Individuals and Organizations
It should be noted that a lot of the concerns / issues with Person Accounts are no longer an issue and are an artifact from when the model was first released. Salesforce is still improving Person Accounts including an update in Summer 16.
We have been using them for years without issues / limitations.
Attribution to: SigV
Possible Suggestion/Solution #2
Your understanding is correct; SFDC unashamedly assumes you're using a standard Sales-y workflow with Accounts and Contacts.
I'm not sure there's a really good alternative here. Some options might be:
You could use a single master Account record with all of your Contacts as children. However this breaks down at volume (100k+ records).
Person Accounts. Here be dragons. Do not tread here if you can possibly avoid it.
A custom object. This gives you a great deal of flexibility but unfortunately means you can't use certain standard functionality that depends on the Contact record or
whoId
(mail merges, tasks, etc)
Attribution to: Jonathan Hersh
Possible Suggestion/Solution #3
Is there a existing natural way to deal with contacts without accounts that would not require custom fields, reports, etc?
@Jonathon Hersh is spot on with his answer regarding how Salesforce is designed to work. That being said, there are some "creative workarounds" for various situations that are possible.
If you have certain "types" of contacts that don't need accounts associated with them, why not create a RecordType and assign all of them to the same "dummy account"? A client I work with does this for all of the individual contractors they use that aren't customer accounts or paid through their normal accounts receivables. You could easily create a variety of different RecordTypes for different types of contacts with each RecordType automatically being assigned to a single account you've set up for that type.
With the new Actions Feature, something like this should be extremely easy to implement and user friendly since the Account and other details would already have the majority of the fields filled-in for users.
Attribution to: crmprogdev
This content is remixed from stackoverflow or stackexchange. Please visit https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/31688