When you do business with individual consumers, you can use Person Accounts. Person accounts are applicable to organizations that operate on a business-to-consumer model. These are all the Salesforce requirements for enabling Person Accounts in an Org.

If you want to enable Person Account in Salesforce, you need to set up a Business Account Record Type. Go to:

  • Setup → Customize → Accounts → Record Types.
  • Create New Record Type.
  • Set “Business Account” as a Record Type Name.
  • Click Next.
  • Accept all defaults and click Save.

Ensure the organization-wide sharing settings have been set for the Contact records to be “Controlled by Parent”. Go to:

  • Setup → Administer → Security Controls → Sharing Settings

Ensure all of the profiles have at least “Read” permissions on the Account and Contacts objects. Go to:

  • Setup → Administer → Manager Users → Profiles

When all of these requirements are fullfilled, then contact Salesforce Support. You should know the Organization ID of the production or sandbox instance that needs this feature. Go to: Setup → Company Profile → Company Information. Then, enter  “I understand that once Person Accounts feature is activated, it can’t be disabled (we encourage testing this feature in a sandbox or a Dev/Free Trial org)” formula and “I’m the system administrator authorized on behalf of this organization to request this feature” formula.

Remember that you cannot disable Person Accounts once you enable them. You cannot use inline editing to change Person Accounts from a Contact list. You can only inline edit them from an Account list. You can use inline editing on contacts associated to business accounts by specifying an additional filter of: “Is Person Account EQUALS False” in your list criteria.

Cecilia Havrilova
CRM Consultant