Considerations for Converting Business Accounts to Person Accounts

Keep these considerations in mind before you convert business accounts to person accounts.

• After a business account is converted to a person account, it can’t be associated with any contacts.
• To prevent duplicate or conflicting data in the person account, some original data is deleted from some account or contact fields during conversion.
  • Account Name on the Account.
  • Phone, Fax, Description, Created By info, Last Modified info, and Last Activity on the Contact.
  To retain the data in these fields, create a custom field for each original field you want to retain. Then, map the original field to the custom field during the import part of the conversion process. To make the data visible on the person account, add the custom fields to the Person Account page layout.
• When you convert a portal-enabled business account to a person account, portal users associated with the business account are deactived and can’t be reactivated again.
• You can use version 8.0 or later of the API to separate person accounts into individual business account and business contact records.

Tip We strongly recommend testing your conversion in a sandbox before importing altered data into your production organization. For more information on sandboxes, visit Sandbox Overview in Salesforce Help.