New way to Handle Households in Salesforce.com
The new version of Salesforce.com changed the way you could relate objects to each other. I had an idea that this could be very powerful, but my naive realist brain needed to see it to believe it.
Indeed, this is very powerful. It has allowed me to greatly simplify the method I use to handle Households. I suggested that things might be better earlier, but they are much better than I thought.
I can now create one custom object called Household that can hold the address info for the house, and then I put a lookup field on a Contact that allows you to associate them with a single Household. Once you do that, there is a report recordset called Opportunites with Contact Roles and Household that you can use. It will give you all gifts by individuals, but groupable by Household.
Very nice, simple, not overly complicated. Interface is clean, and easy to explain. Now I just need to create an S-Control that is a form for creating a contact, thier Household, and their spouse all in one. Would anyone be interested in seeing that?
When I have a minute, I’ll be publishing my steps for setting up Households in Salesforce.com in a nice clean PDF.
[Update]: Here’s the promised PDF on how I set up Householding.
February 14th, 2006 at 5:05 pm
Hi there Scott,
I would be very interested in seeing that S-control. we use householding the regular way - ie every household is an account and family members are contacts (actually the family is a child account as we use SF for many branches worldwide and each branch is a parent account)
However, if you would have that s-control - perhaps we could manipulate it to do the same thing for creating a child account, and 2 or more contacts at once. would the control work for editing purposes or just initial creation?
thanks!!
Most sincerely,
Hudi Falik
DBA
Aish HaTorah