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.