Understanding the Account and Contact model

The Account object is at the heart of many Salesforce core platform cloud products, such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Financial Services Cloud, and Experience Cloud. The Contact object represents a person that is associated with an Account record.

At its most basic interpretation, an Account record represents a company or similar entity from which one or more Contact records can be associated, such as employees. Therefore, an Account record can be thought of as a company or business. An Account record can have many Contact records, representing the employees of that company or business.

Let’s look at how this simple structure is represented diagrammatically:

Figure 8.1 – Simplified Account and Contact object relationship

As you would expect with Salesforce originally being focused on sales teams/selling (hence the company name), the Account object contains many useful standard fields that can...