Accounts in Salesforce

The basis for keeping data about the organizations or people you do business with are accounts in Salesforce. They serve as the main hub for organizing all interactions with customers (or partners) and the associated data on the Salesforce platform.

Information such as account name, contact, billing information, opportunities, cases, and other identifying details are included in these accounts. A closer look at accounts in Salesforce and their significance is provided below.

What are Accounts in Salesforce?

Great businesses are built on great customer relationships. Building those relationships takes time and care, and it also requires information. You need to know who your customers are, where to find them, how to contact them, and how you can make them happy.

An Account is a business entity; it’s a company. We need insight into our business and our data, and that starts with the people we’re doing business with. We can store information about our customers using accounts and contacts. Accounts are companies that we’re doing business with.

An Account is an organization that is a qualified potential customer, an existing customer, a partner, or a competitor or has a relationship of similar significance. Accounts should be created for organizations (companies, nonprofits, foundations) and individuals.

The Account is the glue that holds the relationships (contacts) and interactions (activities, opportunities, cases, etc.) with an organization. The standard Salesforce account is configured for B2B (business-to-business) relationships.

Read More:

What is Sales Cloud in Salesforce?

Types of Accounts in Salesforce

There are two types of accounts in Salesforce: a business account and a person account.

A business account is a combination of contacts and accounts. One Account in Salesforce represents one organization. The other type is Person accounts in Salesforce, which B2C organizations use. These are oriented toward doing business with persons, while others are with companies.

We can enable the use of Person accounts from the setup of our org by sending a request to Salesforce, and if Salesforce approves it, the changes will be reflected in the org, and we also cannot revert it. 

What Differentiates Account from Person Account in Salesforce?

While the accounts in Salesforce are used for a similar purpose irrespective of their type, there are still some differences. Here is what differentiates organization accounts from personal accounts in Salesforce.

1. Person accounts are forever. After they’re turned on, we can’t turn them off.
2. If your organization uses both business accounts and personal accounts, you’ll have to select which type of Account is created whenever someone adds an account.
3. Person accounts can’t have contacts.
4. Person accounts don’t have an account hierarchy.
5. We can’t get account insights for personal accounts (but we can associate personal accounts with social network profiles by using the Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads feature).

What Are The Objects Related to Accounts?

There are various objects related to accounts in Salesforce that you can use to streamline your sales process. Here, we have elaborated on a few of these objects:

1. Account Team

An account team is a team of users who work together on an account. They provide a method to document the roles of multiple users in the management of a single account. Account Teams help various users to better collaborate on accounts by defining a role for each team member.

They also help set record-level access individually and view teams in list views and reports. An account team can be built for each Account.

To display Account Team-related lists on accounts, you can enable it:

setup menu > Account Teams > Enable Account Teams

When selecting an account team member, specify the role that the person plays on the Account. You can define the level of access that each member of the account team has to the Account and any contacts, opportunities, or cases connected to it based on our sharing model.

In this manner, we can grant read-only access to certain team members and write access to others. It is also possible to create a default account team consisting of the individuals we typically collaborate with on our accounts.

In accordance with the allocated roles, we can modify the Team role picklist. Users can only be added to the account team as team members.

2, Partners

Partner accounts are Salesforce accounts that a channel manager uses to manage partner organizations, partner users, and activities when using a partner site or partner portal. A channel manager who owns a partner account can access all the data associated with the partner account and the related partner users.

It shows all the partners (other accounts) involved with that account. The Account can’t be partnered with its Account. One Account can be a partner with different accounts with their respective roles. These roles can be edited by the system administrator in the setup menu.

For example, we have a network service provider account, and a service provider can have different installation partner accounts associated with it in other cities. A single installation account can have more than one service provider. Therefore, there is a many-to-many relationship between Account and Account.

3. Contacts

One of the most important things you need to know about a company is who works there and how to reach them. In Salesforce, the people who work on your accounts are called contacts. In Account and Contact, a lookup relationship exists between them. Even then, you also have cascade delete functionality provided by Salesforce.

4. Opportunities

Opportunity records track details about deals, which accounts they’re for, and the number of potential sales. In Account and Opportunity, you have a lookup relationship between them and a cascade delete functionality provided by Salesforce.

Important Fields in Salesforce Account Objects

There are two fields in the account objects that need to be taken care of: 

1. Parent Account: This is a self-relationship field. It relates 2 accounts to each other. The parent account is selected from the lookup dialog, and the one in which the field exists is the child account. A parent account can’t be a child of itself.
2. Account Name: The name of the company or the person (in case of person accounts) with whom we are doing business.

How to Create Accounts in Salesforce?

You can use three methods to create accounts in Salesforce. 

1. Create accounts in Salesforce manually by clicking on the Accounts tab and selecting New. Once the fields are filled out, you can enter all the data. After that, you can create the Account by clicking Save.
2. You can also create accounts by importing a list of Accounts or Contacts from a data provider.
3. Lastly, you can create an opportunity when a lead is converted. In this case, when a lead is restored, the lead will become a Contact, and the company the lead works for will become the Account.

Things to remember

1. An account can’t be deleted if it is associated with some case or contract.
2. If you delete the Account, then contacts & opportunities related to it will also be deleted.
3. If you delete the parent account, then the child’s Account will not be deleted.

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