Convert a Person Account to a Business Account with a Flow

Converting a Person Account to a Business Account using Salesforce Flow Builder

If you've worked with Person Accounts in Salesforce, then you know that they can be a great solution for B2C organizations, combining the Contact and Account records to a single 'person' entity. Person Accounts can also be the source of a lot of headaches for Salesforce Admins. One of these potential headaches is converting one account type to the other.

Converting a Person Account to a Business Account (Organization) and vice versa requires manipulating the records directly - and every other blog post I could find discussed using Data Loader to accomplish that. But what do you do if you want to let your users perform the conversion? Or maybe you still want to keep this as an Admin function, but you want to be able to do this from the UI, instead of having to prepare and load CSV's every time this is needed?

Let's talk about a bit of the background and challenges before we get into the actual process of converting them...

Celebrate Your Contacts' Birthday Without Code!

UPDATE 2: Additional feedback highlighted another issue - the process would not 're-schedule' the post correctly when changing the birthdate. This has now been resolved by tweaking the entry criteria for the second step from Great than 'TODAY()' to Not Equal 'PRIORVALUE([Contact].Next_Birthday__c)

UPDATE:After posting this article, reader's feedback made me realize there were a few things that needed 'improvement' - specifically, I've updated the entry criteria for the first action to account for updates to the birthdate field, and overhauled the formula used to calculate the next birthday to address birthdays which occur later in the year.

Salesforce provides many automation tools that allow administrators to get a lot done without writing one line of code. In some instances creating the automation is straight-forward and quick, and others require a bit of thinking and planning.
There are definitely some things that are still not possible to achieve without writing some code, but that list continues to get smaller as Salesforce improves their tools and release new ones.

NYC User Group Leader, and recently appointed Salesforce MVP David Giller Follow @davidgiller posted a question on the Success Community yesterday, asking if there is a way to use Process Builder to automatically post a chatter notice, mentioning a contact owner on a contact's birthday.

This may seem impossible, or very simple - depending on your experience with Process Builder.
The same process can be used to e-mail a contact a happy birthday e-mail, or really anything you can do from Process Builder.

Read below for a step-by-step guide on how to implement this.

Easily Use Salesforce to Track Your Salesforce Work

We keep telling our users that 'If it's not in Salesforce it does'nt exist'
The benefits for the Sales and Customer service teams is evident and significant - so why shouldn't you heed your own advice?

Are you already using Salesforce to track the work you do on the platform?

If you are not, think about what you can immediately gain:

1. Master List
   No more forgetting about an e-mail you received a just before you left for vacation
2. Report on your success
   Create reports that you can share with your boss or even with your users
3. Keep your users in the loop
   did you start working on their request already? Is it complete?
4. Audit / History
   What did you do over the last month? Who asked for it? Did someone approve this change?
5. Use Chatter
   Chatter is an amazingly useful collaboration tool - use it to work and communicate with your users

Yeah, that does make sense, doesn't it?
But what is the fastest way to set something like this up?

A Simple Way to Make Approvals Easier for Your Users

I know your users asked you: 

"What is wrong with this record? Why can't I submit for approval?"

You want to make it easier for them. If only there was a way to show them when and why a record can't be submitted for approval!

Using Custom Settings to Control Validation Rules and Workflows

As you customize your Salesforce Org you will undoubtedly create many Validation Rules and Workflows.
These are the bread and butter tools of a Button-Click Admin (a term used to describe an Administrator that can develop new functionality on the Salesforce Platform without writing one line of code). 

While very powerful, there are some scenarios where you may want to have more granular control over how and when they work. For example:

• Create a Validation Rule or Workflow that only applies to some users or profiles (instead of hard-coding profile names into the rule itself)
• Have the ability to turn on/off many Validation Rules/Workflows centrally
• Turn off Validation Rules that interfere with Code Deployment, but only for the user that is performing the deployment
• Create 'Sets' or 'Groupings' of Validation Rules that can be turned on/off centrally

There are many other scenarios and the technique that I am about to share with you can be adapted to many other cases.

Though I only explain here how to utilize this technique for Workflows and Validations, it can easily be adapted to control Triggers as well - and in fact I use this extensively in my Orgs.

One Caveat: as of the time of this writing, this method CANNOT be used with Process Builder, since Custom Settings values are not accessible in this tool yet.