Person Account vs. Business Account in Salesforce
There are two types of accounts in Salesforce. Business accounts store information about companies. Person accounts store information about individual people. Note: In the Salesforce Help and other documentation, the word account by itself always refers to both business accounts and person accounts.
Person Account vs. Contact in Salesforce
A Person Account in Salesforce is essentially an account without any contacts. It stores information about people by combining certain account and contact fields into a single record. A Salesforce Person Account often represents and individual vs. a company and takes on the characteristics of each.
Person accounts are an account type that feature a 1:1 relationship with a single contact. In this model, account and contact information have the ability to blend seamlessly. You can replicate this 1:1 relationship without using Person Accounts. However, as Person Accounts are supported natively, we recommend them where possible.
Instead of linking Contacts to a company or organization, Person Accounts represent an individual, while maintaining the same standard Account functionality. When dealing with related objects and lookup fields, Person Accounts can still use what is available for regular Accounts and Contacts, but also offer the potential for additional benefits.
Person Accounts – What Do I Need to Know?
Benefits
Layouts are one key reason as to why to use Person Accounts as they can include both Account and Contact fields. This philosophically makes a lot of sense for most B2C situations where the separation between Account and Contact fields can become a little fuzzy. Overall, it allows you to model your business around the individual instead of trying to force your data to fit into a B2B bucket that might not be ideal for your particular use case. Person Accounts provide the flexibility to act as an Account or as a Contact depending on the situation.
Person Account Disadvantages
Many see storage space as one key disadvantage to Person Accounts. In order to act as both an Account and a Contact, Person Account records count as a record for both objects. This can be particularly burdensome for companies that are already running low on storage space in Salesforce. In order to mitigate this, Salesforce can offset the additional storage usage by allowing ancillary objects of the Person Account record to be excluded from storage usage counts.
Person accounts also can not be directly associated with other accounts in a hierarchy system and can not be turned off once enabled. There are workarounds to mitigate these issues, but they should definitely be considered prior to making the change.
Setup
Previously, enabling Personal Account was a bit more involved. Now however, your admin is able to enable Person Accounts directly in setup. This means that an administrator can enable Person Accounts at any time without needing to wait on Salesforce support to activate it. Person Accounts can not be turned off, so proper research and consideration should happen prior to activation.
Once Person Accounts are enabled, you’ll have access to the unique setup page for record types, page layouts and compact layouts. You will still be able to find other setup and configuration items on the Account setup page. This means Person Accounts will not actually show up as a separate object in the Object Manager.
Automation
In terms of automation, not much will change compared to using standard Accounts. When building Triggers and Flows, Person Accounts will still utilize the Account object. If you want to filter down to just Person Accounts though, you can! The “IsPersonAccount” flag is available for you to easily differentiate Person Accounts from regular Accounts whenever you need to.
While Person Accounts sometimes emulate Contacts, they will not be affected by Contact object automation. This means that automation built around the Contact will not fire when a Person Account is created or updated.
Person Account – Recap
As a quick recap, here are some important highlights on using Person Accounts:
- Person Accounts enhance your ability to blend Account and Contact information on layouts
- Person Accounts are the Salesforce official model for representing an individual
- As an official model for Salesforce, utilizing Person Accounts could lead to faster adoption and better support options
- Businesses that need to support B2B and B2C information can still utilize both Person Accounts and Business Accounts
Person Accounts are already used in many of the industry-centric Salesforce models such as Financial Services, Healthcare & Life Sciences, and Retail & Consumer Goods.
If you have questions on Person Accounts, contact us to discuss your specific needs.
