In Salesforce, person accounts are a special type of record designed to represent individuals rather than business entities. Person accounts are typically used in business-to-consumer (B2C) scenarios where the focus is on individual consumers rather than companies or organizations. This is particularly common in industries such as retail, financial services, and healthcare.
Enable Person Accounts
Person accounts store information about individuals by combining certain account and contact fields into one record. Below are the steps necessary for enabling this feature:
From Setup, enter Person Accounts in the Quick Find box, and then select Person Accounts.
Go through the steps listed on the Setup page.
Acknowledge the org implications of enabling person accounts.
Make sure the account object has at least one record type.
Make sure user profiles that have read permission on accounts have read permission on contacts.
The organization-wide default sharing is set so that either Contact is Controlled by Parent or both Account and Contact are Private.
Turn on Person Accounts.
After Person Accounts is enabled, a person account record type is created. You can create additional record types for person account if needed.
Person Account Considerations
Before enabling person accounts, consider the following:
After you’ve enabled person accounts, you can’t disable them.
A single person account uses more storage space than a business account.
Some AppExchange packages can’t be used with person accounts. Before you enable person accounts, check AppExchange or contact the app builder to make sure that person accounts are compatible with the apps you need.
Preparing Salesforce For Person Accounts
Before enabling person accounts, prepare your sharing settings and record types:
Note: Person accounts can’t be turned off once they’re enabled. We recommend testing your person account implementation in a trial, development, or sandbox environment before having person accounts enabled for your active Salesforce organization.
Create at least one record type for business accounts. Salesforce creates a record type for person accounts when they’re enabled.
Set the organization-wide sharing setting for contact records to Controlled by Parent.
Give at least ”Read” permission on contacts to all profiles that have at least ”Read” permission for accounts.