Introducing Person Accounts

In the business view of Accounts and Contacts, where an Account is a company and a Contact is an employee of that company, the business deals (Opportunities) are related to the Account record. When selling to individual people, such as a banking client in the case of a Financial Services Cloud implementation, we need to associate Opportunities with those people as if they were Account records. This is where the Person Account concept comes in.

A Person Account is a special type of Account record that pulls through some, but not all, information of a single associated Contact record onto it. This allows the information about the person (from the associated Contact information) to be represented when associating a business deal (Opportunity) with that person. The Opportunity is still associated with the Account record to form the Person Account.

When enabling a Person Account, the Account and Contact Organization-Wide Defaults (OWDs) need to be set...