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Sol1977 Contact Related List has no ADD Button
When I go into an account, I would like to add a contact to the contact related list. However it only has two buttons NEW and MERGE, so what if I already have a contact created, how do I go about adding that contact, I would have expected that the contact related list would have had an ADD button that would give you a lookup and you could select the contact.
Anyone come accross this? This seems a basic essential that has been left out. Is there a way to modify the contacts related list?
You don't *add* a Contact to the related list of the Account, it's the other way around.
*If* the Contact's Account lookup is pointing to a specific Account, then the Contact will show up in that Account's related list.
So, if you have a Contact: Tony, and you wish that Tony be related to the "Toyota" Account, then you go to Edit Tony's record and set the Account lookup to Toyota.
Then, when you go back to Toyota, you'd see Tony in the related list.
Best, Steve.
Thanks for the reply.
Let me explain a little more clearly:
We have Person accounts enabled as we deal with both business customers and end users, when we setup a new Person account (John Smith) SF creates a Person account along with a contact. So effectively John Smith is an account but also a contact.
So we would setup opportunities etc. under John Smith as he does business with us and so on and so forth, however if later we wanted to add John Smith's company as a Business Account we would definitly want to associate John Smith as a contact under that new Business Account, however without an ADD button to the contacts relatedd list we are unable to do so. All you can do is NEW or MERGE which doesn't quite work as if we selected NEW we would essentially create a duplicate contact entry.
I am not an expert on PersonAccounts, generally my advice to people is to stay away from them because they are not the "mainstream" usages and third party products often expect Accounts and Contacts to be distinct.
Having said that, I am under the impression that, behind the scenes, Person Accounts are implemented by the system creating a Contact and a shadow Account object, and relating that Contact to that Account. If that's the case, then I don't think you can also relate a Person Account instance to a standard Account since the Contact reference is already "spoken for".
Perhaps you could create an additional Custom Field lookup on your person account which you could use to link it to that persons related Business Account.
Best, Steve.
After digging and I mean a great deal of pick and shovel work, SF recommends using the Partner related list for tracking person account relationships with business account relationships.
So what I will do is disable the NEW and MERGE buttons from the contact related list so that we dont have users accidentally doubling up and adding contacts that essentialy exist.
We selected the option of enabling person accounts because we run a retail outlet as well as B2B style, so we have to cater to both really. How we look at person accounts and contacts as far as our sales team goes is that contacts are not customers and accounts are customers. Contacts are visible to the sales person only wheeras Accounts (person accounts) are available to all. So thats fine but SF doesn't really have much of a mechanism for a contact becoming a Person account other then that a contact can be treated as a person acount with opportunities, when a contact gets related to an account it is then visible globally of course.
Salesforce could fix this by allowing person accounts to be linked to business accounts just like business accounts can be linked to other business accounts, and then of course provide a related list that shows this relationship.........my two cents :)