Salesforce.com Questions from Students

Question:
I see on developer.force.com reference to IsPersonAccount - apparently a checkbox indicating that the account is a person (or not). I don't see it in the standard fields list for Accounts in Setup. Is there a particular version or edition that I need in order to see it? Or is it only available through the API?

Answer:
That field is enabled when you enable Person Accounts. You have to make a request to Salesforce to have Person Accounts enabled. Once they are enabled, you will see that field in the UI and through the API.

Question:

We have Employers, Brokers, Reps, Enrollment Entities, Offices. All have relationships to each other. When we briefly talked about this, you said that all would be Accounts. While I can see that thinking, I'm not clear how to establish the relationship of one account to another. Can you guide me?

Answer:
Accounts are organizations and also support parent child relationships out of the box. My recommendation would be to create a record type for each type of account (Employer, Broker, etc...). I'm not sure exactly of the relationship between each type of Account, but the most flexible option would be to create a Junction object called Account Relationship. This object would have 3 fields:

1. Account (Lookup)
2. Account (Lookup)
3. Relationship Type (Picklist)
   • Employer to Broker
   • Broker to Employer
   • Broker to Rep
   • Rep to Broker
     

This would allow you to create as many relationships as you wanted between whatever objects you wanted without requiring the creation of a large number of lookup fields.