Execute better using Salesforce.com, Basecamp, and Quickbooks

How you store your client information inside Salesforce.com makes a big difference. One area where this is very clear is Accounts and Contacts. Salesforce began as a business tool and therefore focused on business to business (B2B) relationships. Therefore, the Account object is oriented toward a business or company by default.

These relationships look like this:

ACCOUNT (i.e. Acme, Inc., www.acme.com, 1-800-ACME-INC)
|
|
----- CONTACT (i.e. Joe Smith, joe@acme.com, 555-555-1212)
----- CONTACT
...

This works great when there is a company such as a company client, vendor, or partner and it has employees that are related to it.

However, what happens when the client is an individual person such as someone who bought one of your e-books or a t-shirt? What happens when you are a nonprofit that relates to individual as well as institutional donors?

This is where a fairly recent addition to Salesforce, Person Accounts, comes into play.

Instead of being forced into this parent-child relationship between the Account and Contact, it combines these two objects into one Account/Contact object called a Person Account that looks like this:

PERSON ACCOUNT (i.e. Joe Smith, www.joesworld.com, joe@gmail.com, 555-555-1212)

So, let’s say you started out in Salesforce without Person Accountsenabled or you still find your team creating Accounts and Contacts for B2C individuals. What can you do besides just retyping in all the info in a new Person Account? Can you just convert it?

Well, Salesforce states the only path to change a Contact into a Person Account has these requirements:

1. You must use the Application Programming Interface (API) to do it.
2. You cannot make any other updates or changes to the record at the same time.
3. You must create an Account/Contact pair. That’s one Account with one Contact. The new Person Account will take the Account name.
4. The Account must have a blank Parent Account value.
5. The Contact must have a blank Reports To value.
6. All data in any shared fields (i.e. phone, etc.) between the Account/Contact need to match.*

* I have found that converting a Contact with a mailing address and an Account with no address still works.

Now, the most painful of these steps for a normal Salesforce user is #1. Dealing with the API is a great feature but many stellar admins and users are not familiar with these concepts and are not interested.

Previous discussions I’ve read cover the Data Loader or Excel Connector which can certainly hammer this nail like a sledgehammer but are very developer oriented and overkill for this common task. They are Windows-only apps as well.

Thankfully, there is a much easier way to get this done for Mac, PC, and Linux users on-the-go with less than 10 lines of Javascript from right within Firefox.

More in Part 2.

– Jon