You are here:
Considerations for Relating a Contact to Multiple Accounts
Get familiar with tips, tricks, and potential pitfalls before you relate a contact to more than one account.
Required Editions
| Available in: both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Contact Manager, Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions |
General
- Contacts to Multiple Accounts is enabled via Setup and not via the Metadata API.
- The account in the Account Name field on a contact record is the contact’s primary account. The relationship between the contact and its primary account is a direct relationship. All other accounts that are related to the contact are indirect relationships.
- Disabling Contacts to Multiple Accounts deletes all indirect account-contact relationships. Associations between a contact and its primary account remain.
- To remove a direct relationship between a contact and an account, change the contact’s primary account or delete the contact.
- Most features continue to reference a contact’s primary account. For example, duplicate management uses the primary account when comparing records. For that reason, indirect account–contact relationships can’t be included in the matching criteria used to find duplicate records.
- Indirect contacts aren’t available in reports run from an Account & Contact standard report type.
- You can import account–contact relationships with the Data Loader but not with the Data Import Wizard.
- In Lightning Experience and the Salesforce mobile app, the Add to Campaign action isn’t available on items in the Related Contacts related list on account records. To see the full related list and access the Add to Campaign mass action, click View All.
- If the Require permission to view record names in lookup fields setting is enabled, users don’t see names of related accounts that they don’t have access to in lookup fields. To show the data, give users read access to the record or the View All Lookup Record Names permission. See Require Permission to View Record Names in Lookup Fields.
- You can create Experience Cloud site users from Contacts to Multiple Accounts. To grant access to their records, configure a sharing set.
Account Contact Relationships
- All direct contacts appear in the account record’s Related Contacts related list. But it’s possible that your admin removed the Contacts related list from your page layouts.
- When you have access to a particular account, the related contacts that you have Read access to appear in the Related Contacts related lists. When you have access to a particular contact, all related accounts appear in the Related Accounts related list. You can open the ones to which you have Read access.
- When creating indirect relationships between accounts and contacts, the contact must have a primary account—it can’t be a private contact.
- You can’t create a contact from the Account Contact Relationship detail page.
- Changing a contact’s primary account can trigger a workflow rule that changes the primary account to something else. In that event, Salesforce saves the relationship between the contact and the account you selected as an indirect relationship. Your admin controls the settings for saving previous relationships.
- Some lists of most recently used items (such as a contact lookup field) only show direct relationships.
- When you remove indirect relationships, they’re deleted and can’t be restored from the Recycle Bin.
- If you delete a direct relationship, indirect relationships are removed. In this case, if the direct relationship is restored, the indirect relationship is also restored.
- When Contacts to Multiple Accounts is enabled, an Account Contact Relationship record is created for each contact with a primary account, and for each person account.
Merging
- If you try to merge contacts that are indirectly related to the same account, an error message instructs you to remove the duplicate relationship. The same is true when merging accounts that are indirectly related to the same contact. The error message includes which account–contact relationships prevent the merge, regardless of whether you have access to the records. Without access to a record, you can’t navigate to it.
- When merging person accounts, indirect relationships with accounts and indirect relationships with contacts are evaluated separately. If you have conflicts with both, resolve the two errors separately.
Microsoft Integration
- When syncing contacts between Salesforce and Microsoft Outlook, only the primary account relationship is synced.
- If you remove the account name from a contact in Outlook, the contact can’t sync to Salesforce if the contact has relationships to other accounts.
Admin Settings
- What happens when you attempt to delete an account that includes direct contacts related to other accounts depends on what your admin has specified. You’re either blocked from deleting the account or allowed to delete the account. Deleting the account also deletes the account’s direct contacts, regardless of whether they have relationships to other accounts.
- When you change a contact’s primary account, Salesforce either deletes the previous account, or saves it as an indirect relationship. Your admin’s settings determine what happens to the previous account.
- Whether activities roll up to a contact’s parent account depends on what your admin specified in the activity settings.
Account Contact Relationship Object
- The following custom field types aren’t supported.
- Lookup relationship
- Master-detail relationship
- Roll-up summary
- Text area (long)
- Text area (rich)
- The following features and customizations aren’t supported.
- Field history
- Field sets
- Approvals
- Record types
- Field label renaming
- Custom actions are supported, but with limitations.
- Custom actions must be specific to the Account Contact Relationship object. Global actions aren’t supported.
- You can create actions that update records or invoke Lightning components or Visualforce pages. However, you can’t create actions that create records.
- You can’t create actions that send emails or log calls because the Account Contact Relationship object can’t have activities related to it.
- You can’t override the default actions on the Account Contact Relationship object.
- Only custom actions that are created on the Contact object can use the Account Contact Relationship object as a target object.
- Chatter standard actions aren’t supported because the Account Contact Relationship object doesn’t have a Chatter feed.
- Custom buttons are supported, but a custom button on a list view can’t have a Visualforce page as the content source.
Did this article solve your issue?
Let us know so we can improve!
