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Brad BumbaloughBrad Bumbalough 

Built in functionality for Accounts?

Hello,

 

My org provides services to households, and we need to track the members of that household. We originally had custom objects for Households and People, but are now transferring from People to Contacts so we can use the Communities, HTML email tracking, and other standard functionalities that require using Contacts. 

 

My question is, what are the Salesforce functionality that depend on Accounts? We are planning on still using our custom object Housholds and not using Accounts, but want to consider the possibility of making Households into Accounts if the features are necessary.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

-Brad

Best Answer chosen by Admin (Salesforce Developers) 
sfdcfoxsfdcfox
Contacts that do not use an account are "private." This affects reporting, portals, and sharing. Non-administrators can only see "private" contacts by searching, and not through reports. All non-administrators can only see their own private contacts. Nobody can directly run a report in salesforce.com that shows all contacts owned by all users when those contacts are private, even system administrators. This is reflected by the standard report filters: "My Contacts" (will show private contacts, but only if the running user owns the contacts), "My Accounts" (will not show private contacts at all), "My Team's Contacts/All Contacts" (will also not show private contacts). Also, if you later choose to use the partner portal, customer portal, etc, those contacts won't be able to participate in those portals.

In summary, not using accounts will require you to set all users to administrators, and you won't be able to report on those contacts easily.

You have two choices, though:

(1) Convert the contacts to Person Accounts. This gives the account requirement, and you can still link them to the custom Household object.

(2) Use accounts instead of households. If you use accounts exclusively this way, you could also rename accounts to households to clean up the user interface.