Hi Guys,
I have a requirement where I am working with a client who has b2c individuals who do not have a company and they are using bucket accounts meaning( a place holder account to hold up to 100 contacts for now). We are in the process of moving them to person accounts and would appreciate it if you could answer the following questions.
1. If we end up creating person accounts for these existing bucket accounts from a data migration standpoint, do we need to reinsert all the contacts in a sandbox and have salesforce create person accounts for them or do they have to insert new person accounts for every contact and update the contact account id to use the person account id?
2. Is there any blogs, documentation of migrating customers from bucket accounts to person accounts from sandbox to production?
3. One of the annoying features of person accounts is that the person accounts showing up on the search results for sales reps who get confused. Is there a way to hide the person accounts on search results( only person account record types but still show organization record types on accounts)? How are others dealing with search results on person accounts?
4. If we move to a person account model, how would we prevent users from accidentally clicking on the person account detail page and change something? We want to disable the page layout or hide it.
5. Is there any documentation currently that talks about limitations of person accounts from an integration, performance and other considerations?
Hi Buyan, I think that you are doing the right thing and that your customer should be using Person Account indeed.
1) The migration can be a pain but worth the effort. You do need to turn it on and make sure that after cutover the users only create PA records (pairs of Account and Contact) but at some point, you do need to migrate the old Buckets into PA. There is no GUI way to convert Bucket Accounts records to PA. So you've got to handle it through the API (dataloader or code). If you read my presentation on the subject that would hopefully give you some pointers. Make sure that when you transform existing Bucketed records you end up using the right (PA) Record Type.
2) You could try and read my stuff but be careful to all non-salesforce recommendations, They are not official and can lead you to a wall in the end.
3) You could use the flag "isPersonAccount" accessible both from the Account and from the Contact to filter out what should not be visible.
4) This looks like a training issue more than a system issue? Still you should be able to do a bit of customization work based on the value of the record type.
5) My main pet peeve is the fact that Salesforce still charges their customers for the 2 records used by Person Account when in fact they only model 1 (B2C) client. Other than this it's pretty standard and that's the point to go back to the Person Account model in your case. Other than this there is the implementation guide from Salesforce, but I guess you've already read it.
All the best!
Fabrice
