The Ingenuity of Person Accounts

As I meditated more on the idea in my previous post about people's connections to different accounts, a surprising realization occurred to me: We don't even have to engineer a new object; Salesforce has already done this for us! And the answer is... Person Accounts!

The basic implementation can be done in two simple steps:

1. Activate the Person Accounts feature.
2. Create Person_Account__c as a Lookup(Account) field on the Contact object

Conceptually, the idea is simple: The person is the core piece of the puzzle. Take John Doe, for example. John can be a contact for Acme Corporation and simultaneously be a contact for Zenith, Inc. All that's needed to represent these relationships are a person account record for John, two business account records for Acme and Zenith, and two contact records to link John to the two accounts.

Although I haven't thought this next idea in much more depth, I have an inkling that this model could potentially even replace the Nonprofit Starter Pack's Household object with a "Household Account" record type. Wouldn't that be a beautiful alignment of developer resources? All of Salesforce's main development efforts on Contacts and Accounts could then directly benefit all users in every industry. No more waiting for updates to the NPSP Householding package; just wait for the next seasonal release of Salesforce.