Finding Accounts with No Contacts?

[PlanetRich]

Is there a best practice on finding Accounts that have no contacts attached to them?

[Stevemo · Accepted solution]

First create a custom field on the Contact record:

Fieldname = Contact 

Datatype = (Number,0)

default value = 1

Then create a Custom Report Type that displays Accounts with OR without Contacts.  

Then create a Summary report using the Accounts with OR without Contacts.  Group the report by your custom Contact =1 field.  The report will split your Accounts between the ones with contacts and the ones without.   

[PlanetRich]

Seems pretty good way that will help.   Right now we actually synchronize the Account and Contacts tables out to a remote MySQL database and run normal SQL queries on it.  I was hoping that there was now a more direct way to do this (e.g., using the new Spring SOQL stuff - haven't looked through that).  Your mechanism at least keeps this inside the Salesforce process, which is what we're looking for (i.e., to assign to folks to work on regularly).

This is such a generally important thing to do in a CRM and there's pretty much no discussion on the Discussion Boards no matter how much you search for this issue (and there's no FAQ or discussion of this in documentation).  

[PlanetRich]

Wow - that report suggestion actually is really good - never really used report types to any great extent.  Very simple to point to that report and have folks understand what to do with it.

[AshishTomar]

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[dacology]

Yes this did the job... A little techy, but solves a problem that has always been inherent in Salesforce. Saves me a lot of VLOOKUP effort.

Thanks