Account – Page 2 – Nerd @ Work

Account object is the very first object you’ll see on the CRM, mostly because it is the first standard object tab you are presented when you open up a new Developer ORG:

The Account object represents an organization or a person that is involved in your business and that related with the other objects of your CRM.

Account could be a partner, competitor or simply a customer.

Account could also be an individual, and this leads to Person Account: they are a special kind of Accounts because they are strictly related to an underlying Contact object, and so are not identified anymore by a simple Name but by FirstName and LastName.
Person Accounts can be placed both on Account and Contact lookups (that’s because they are a composition of 2 different objects).
To activate the Person Account feature, you have to ask to the Salesforce support.

Account object have a lot standard fields (2 set of addresses, contact fields, business fields such as TicketSymbol or YearStarted).
If we have the Person Account feature enabled and if the Account is created as or converted to a Person Account, it will acquire a set a Contact’s fields such as FirstName, LastName, Suffic, MiddleName and other fields with a suffix of Person (e.g. PersonBirthDate, PersonTitle but also 2 other sets of addresses, like PersonOtherAddress and PersonMailingAddress).

Reading the docs of Account’s fields, I came across to a strange behavior of the PersonBirthDate field in queries: The year portion of the PersonBirthDate field is ignored in filter criteria, including report filters, list view filters, and SOQL queries. That is to say that this query:

SELECT FirstName, LastName, PersonBirthDate FROM Account WHERE Birthdate > TODAY

will query for all Accounts which birthday comes after TODAY (disregarding the year).

Accounts can be created directly via CRM, API or by converting Leads.

Accounts are also related to customer portal or Community users: every user in your communities will have a related Contact object which will be related itself to an Account record (which can “parent” more than one User/Contact). A Person Account will thus be User’s Contact and Account as well.

Account is also strictly related to Opportunity, Contact, Case, Contact objects.

Back to the Sobject Crusade list.

Source: AccountCleanInfo

This object is related to Data.com features (access to a big DB of accounts and contacts).

To enable this on your Developer Org, click on Setup > Manage Users > Users and search for your user.

Click on Edit button/link and update the Data.com User Type field:

Now you can import Account/Contact records from Data.com with the following limitations (Setup > Data.com Administration > Licenses & Limits):

You can import an Account from Data.com by clicking on the All Tabs tab, then Data.com, select Find Accounts tab and then search for an Account.

Select a record and then click the Add to Salesforce button to automagically add a new Account record:

And then the Account is stored on your CRM:

Now edit your Account layout and add the Clean Status (Account.CleanStatus) field and the Clean standard button:

Now let’s change, e.g., the Account Site:

The Not Compared status means that no comparison has been made.

SELECT id, Account.CleanStatus, IsDifferentPhone from AccountCleanInfo where accountid =’0012400000EMg8T’

The Pending Account state is the low level value for Not Compared.

The comparison can be made in 2 ways:

Manually using the Clean button (we’ll be using this)
Going to Data.com Adminsitration > Clean > Jobs

This will trigger a daily job that will compare your accounts/contacts taken from Data.com. More details here

The job will put Account.CleanStatus to be Different: you can manually do it by clicking on the Clean button and then pressing the Cancel button: