Considerations for Using Person Accounts

Person accounts can’t be included in account hierarchies. To allow users to include person accounts in contact hierarchies, turn on the Reports To field.

Person accounts can’t be parent accounts of other accounts or of contacts. However, you can use Contacts to Multiple Accounts to create indirect relationships between a person account and another person account, business account, or contact. And, you can use the Reports To field to create associations between person accounts and other person accounts and contacts in a reporting structure.

In Lightning Experience orgs where Shared Activities isn’t enabled, activity visibility differs for an activity associated with a person account through the Name field. In this case, the activity is visible in the person account’s Activity Timeline only. It isn’t visible in activity related lists: Open Activities and Activity History.

Person accounts can be associated with events or tasks by using the Name or the Related To field.

Person accounts can be invited to events.

For users to request a meeting with a person account, the Email field must be included in the person account page layout.

Person accounts can be added to campaigns and have a Campaign History related list.

If an admin creates a Contact related list based on a custom lookup relationship, the Add to Campaign row-level action isn’t displayed on person accounts. To see the full related list and access the Add to Campaign mass action, click View All. This procedure applies to Lightning Experience and the Salesforce mobile app. (The Add to Campaign action isn’t available in Salesforce Classic.)

Person accounts can be enabled as users for customer Experience Cloud sites and portals.

Person accounts can’t be enabled as users for partner Experience Cloud sites and portals because partners represent companies, not individuals. Similarly, person accounts can’t be used with Lightning External Apps Plus licenses.

Person account owner power users can be configured to allow your site to accommodate the number of users or roles that are needed.

When you look up a Contact in Lightning Experience, Person Account records don't appear in the Instant Results list, and in Global Search results when scoped to Contact. To receive Person Account records, scope to the Account object.

The Account Name field must be accessible on the Contact object to view person accounts related to contacts. If not, the contact record is accessible, but the related person account is not.

As with contacts, you can send individual emails and group emails to person accounts.

In Lightning Experience, you can send list emails to person accounts from Contact list views but not Account list views.

These Salesforce email integration features support person accounts.

• Gmail integration
• Outlook integration
• Lightning Sync
• Salesforce Inbox
• Salesforce for Outlook
• Connect Offline

When person accounts are enabled, encrypting some account fields encrypts the equivalent contact fields, and vice versa.

See the General Shield Platform Encryption Considerations.

Account and contact fields that appear on person account records can be tracked using the account field history settings. Person account field history is then captured in the Account History related list, the Account History report, and field audit trails.

Field history for accounts tracks both business accounts and person accounts. For more information, see Track Field History for Standard Objects.

Most standard account and contact fields and all custom account and contact fields are available for person account page layouts.

To set field-level security on a Person Account field, set security on the corresponding Contact field. The Person Account field inherits the same security setting from the Contact field. You can't specify a different security setting on a Person Account field compared to the corresponding Contact field.

Person accounts don’t support certain business account fields (such as Parent Account) and some contact fields. See Account Fields.

If your org uses person accounts, the Account Fields page lists both person account and business account fields. Person accounts use a combination of account and contact fields. These contact fields are available for person accounts, but not for business accounts.

• Fields in the Account Standard Fields list that display with a person account icon.
• Fields in the Contact Custom Fields & Relationships list.

In Salesforce Classic, person accounts have a person icon (), whereas business accounts have a folder icon ().

In Lightning Experience, person accounts have a person with a building icon (), while business accounts have a building icon ().

In Lightning Experience, leads that don’t have a value in the Company field are converted to person accounts. Leads that do have a value in the Company field are converted to business accounts.

In Salesforce Classic and the Salesforce mobile app, you can convert leads without company information to an existing business account even if person accounts are enabled.

To display a custom Lightning page for person accounts, create a custom account record page, then assign it to the person account record type.

Suppose that an admin creates a Lightning page for accounts and assigns it as the default for an org or an app. That page becomes the org or app default for both business accounts and person accounts.

Person accounts appear in all but these account and contact list views.

• Recent Contacts on the Contacts home page in Salesforce Classic
• Recent Contacts on the Contacts home page in Lightning Experience
• Recently Viewed Contacts on the Contacts home page in Lightning Experience

An admin can show which records are person accounts by adding the Is Person Account field to the list of fields to display. To include or exclude person accounts from a list view, add the Is Person Account field to the filter criteria.

You can include person account components and attributes in managed and unmanaged packages.

If you removed Middle Name, Suffix, or Informal Name from a person account object or any person object including Contact, Lead, or User, those fields are still always available in Apex when it runs in a managed package.

Person accounts have their own page layouts, which can include account and contact fields, account custom links, and account and contact related lists.

Person accounts page layouts don’t support the Parent Account field. See Account Fields.

To customize the names of tabs and fields displayed on person account records, an admin must customize the account and contact tabs and fields.

Renaming person accounts has differing effects on the entity history label between Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience. In Lightning Experience, the person account history label is fixed as “Person Account History.” In Salesforce Classic, the entity history label is renamed to “[new entity name] History.”

The Reports To field on the Person Account object allows users to associate person accounts and contacts with other person accounts and contacts in a reporting structure. Enabling this field can affect integrations, workflows, or validations that use the Reports To field on Contact.

Before separating a person account into a business account and a contact, ensure that the Reports To field is empty.

Person accounts can’t report to themselves or to contacts or person accounts lower in the hierarchy.

In Lightning Experience and the Salesforce mobile app, person accounts appear in both account and contact search results. In Salesforce Classic, person accounts appear only in account search results.

To help users differentiate person accounts from business accounts in search results, admins can add the Is Person Account field to the appropriate search layout.

You can configure person accounts with an account configuration in Search Manager, but you can’t configure fields that are specific to person accounts such as Email. Contact configurations don’t affect person accounts.

If person accounts are enabled, the organization-wide default sharing must be set in one of these two ways.

• Contacts are set to Controlled by Parent
• Accounts and contacts are both set to Private