One contact and multiple accounts!

[LeandroMedeiros]

Is it possible to have one contact associated with multiple accounts? How
can this be achieved?

[NPM]

Take a look at Contact Roles

From help and training.: https://na3.salesforce.com/help/doc/user_ed.jsp?section=help&loc=help&target=contactroles.htm%23topic-title

[Stevemo]

That's the way to do it (NPM)

[rkirkpat]

It would probably help if you could describe your situation more. I'm not sure if I can help you directly, but I can at least validate your frustrations as I deal with this lack of functionality as well.

It's important to understand that SF is designed for Business to Business (B2B) customer relations. As such, only the account matters and no person (contact) is involved with more than one of them. So for B2B, SF's limitation of one account per contact is no big deal.

I work in a nonprofit setting, which is anything but B2B in logic. We are focused on the contact records and things get complicated quickly.

Say Jane Doe donates to your organization via her employer, ABC Inc. Well, Jane is a contact under the ABC Inc accountant. But then we need to ask Jane for donations by mailing her home address, which she shares with John, who works for XYZ LLC. She also convinced her neighborhood association to contribute to our nonprofit. All this while John is busy getting a business (not XYZ) to sponsor us, for which he sits on the board.

So how do you get multiple accounts for one contact? That's a pretty good question. If contact roles can meaningfully negotiate the mess I just described, it would be handy to get a description of how that works.

The nonprofit starter pack makes use of a custom object called "Account Affiliation," which is in a Master-Detail relationship with the standard Accounts and Contacts objects. This solution may provide you with the flexibility that you need, but might be difficult to set up depending on your understanding of SF. 

[NPM]

From Help and Training - Search on Contact Roles and there is a great deal of information that explains the concept and helps you get started. - Avilable in ALL Editions 

What is a Contact Role?

Available in: All Editions

A contact role defines the part that a contact or person account plays in a specific account, case, contract, or opportunity. For example, Tom Jones might be the "Decision Maker" for the opportunity, and Mary Smith might be the "Evaluator." You can assign a contact role to any contact or person account that affects your account, case, contract, or opportunity. Contacts and person accounts can have different contact roles on various accounts, cases, contracts, or opportunities.

The Contact Roles related list of an account, case, contract, or opportunity displays the roles that each contact or person account plays in that record. On person account detail pages, the Opportunity Contact Roles related list displays the opportunities on which the person account is listed in the Account Name field of the opportunity.

Note

Users must have the appropriate user permissions and sharing access to view the contact information for any person listed in the appropriate contact roles related lists.

[rkirkpat]

I didn't realize that contact roles could be used to relate contacts with accounts. NPM, from your post it appears that the Account Affiliation object that I described from the Nonprofit Starter Pack (NSP) is redundent. Another possibility is that this particular custom object is actually the standard Contact Role object, but is masked through customized coding.

Anyways, gripes about the NSP can be handled in another discussion.

How much flexibility is given in terms of reporting on Contact Roles tied to Accounts?

Is it possible to create a report that returns all of the contacts with contact roles assigned to the account of an open opportunity?

NPM, thanks for your comment. I don't suppose you could help me out with on the Contact Role Master List thread on this same discussion board? The "great deal of information" on in the help and training section has proven to be rather elusive.

Thanks again. 

[NPM]

I imagine reporting is as flexible as is all Salesforce reporting.  Trying creating a new report and select the data type Accounts with Contact Roles.

As for the other post - try reposting it in the Custom Formula fields discussions.  I'm not sure if you can do what you want but there is usually someone there that can suggest a way. 

[Tulipe]

I think all of you make the simple thing complicate.

The simplest way is to create a custom lookup field in Account to lookup Contact.

This case could happen when one of your partner account's contacts need to deal with some of your customer accounts.

[Siva_org]

HI,

It's possible. You have to create a Junction object(It's a custom object that should consist of two fields with Master-Detail relationship datatype)

First field(Master-Detail Relationship with Account)

Second field(Master-Detail Relationship with Contact)

After creating these things, this junction object comes automatically in the related list of Account and contacts. Now you can easily attach more Accounts to a Contact.