Skip to main content
Person Accounts is a Salesforce feature that combines the fields of an Account (Account) and those of a Contact (Contact) into a single record, to represent an individual person instead of a company. A Person Account seen in Salesforce If your org has it enabled, the same Account object can hold two different things: companies (Business Accounts) and people (Person Accounts). What separates them is the record type.
That distinction is the source of almost every problem. Treble can write to a Person Account perfectly well, but an account becomes a Person Account at the moment it’s created, and it can’t be changed afterwards with a block.

​
Before you start: the setup in Salesforce

Person Accounts requires preparation on the Salesforce side that is independent of Treble. If it’s incomplete, Treble won’t be able to create Person Accounts no matter how well it’s configured. Person Accounts settings screen in Salesforce Setup Ask your Salesforce administrator to confirm, for the profile of the user Treble was connected with:
1

The Person Account record type is assigned to the profile

In Setup → Profiles → the profile → Record Type Settings → Accounts, the Person Account record type must be in Selected Record Types.
2

It's set as the default Person Account type

In the Business Account and Person Account Default Record Types section, the Person Account Default Record Type dropdown must have the Person Account type selected.
3

The default Business Account type is not --Master--

The Business Account Default Record Type dropdown must have a real value, not --Master--.
Remember the general recommendation: connect Treble with a dedicated service user. If the user belongs to someone on the team and someone changes their profile, the integration may start creating Business Accounts without anyone noticing.

​
How to make sure Treble creates Person Accounts

Setting RecordTypeId in an action block is not enough. Blocks write after the record exists: by the time the block tries to set the type, the account has already been created as a Business Account, or the creation has already failed because of a validation rule.

Why this happens

There are two ways to make the account be created correctly:
Treble can send a fixed RecordTypeId at the moment of creation of any Account.Write to your Customer Success Manager with the 18-character Id of the Person Account record type. You can find it in Setup → Object Manager → Account → Record Types, by opening the type and copying the Id from the URL.
It’s a fixed value for the entire Account object. If your operation also needs to create companies (Business Accounts) from Treble, this option won’t work: every account would end up as a Person Account. Mention it to your Customer Success Manager before requesting it.

​
First name and last name

In a Person Account, the name works differently than in a company account:
You can write FirstName and LastName from an action block, just like any other property. The Name field will be updated on its own, based on both.
If you try to write directly to Name on a Person Account, Salesforce rejects it. Use FirstName and LastName.
LastName is required in Salesforce for a Person Account. If your flow only asks for the first name, consider also asking for the last name, or defining a fallback value with your Customer Success Manager so that the creation doesn’t fail when the person doesn’t provide it.

​
Branch the flow based on the account type

When your Account object has people and companies mixed together, you often want to treat them differently in the conversation. The pattern is to read the record type into a variable and connect a Conditions block: Read the record type and branch between Person Account and Business Account
1

Read the Record Type ID property

With the read block, on the Account object, save the value into a variable such as {{record_type}}.
2

Connect a Conditions block

Create one condition for Person Account and another for Business Account, and leave the default case for everything else (for example, when the person doesn’t exist yet and the variable arrives empty).
Don’t forget the In all other cases path. For a new contact that doesn’t exist in Salesforce yet, the variable arrives empty and doesn’t fall into either of the two conditions.
You can also use the record type as a custom hierarchy in an action block, to specifically target that person’s Person Account-type account: Action block with hierarchy by record type

​
Common issues

The integration user’s profile doesn’t have the Person Account type as its default type. Review the Salesforce setup section at the beginning of this page.Accounts that were already created incorrectly don’t fix themselves: they need to be converted in Salesforce.
It’s almost always a validation rule tied to the record type. Because the account is born with the wrong type, rules that don’t belong to it are applied.Confirm the record type first; it’s very likely that several different errors are resolved with that single change.
In a Person Account, Name is a calculated field. Write FirstName and LastName instead.
Run the object sync. If they still don’t appear after syncing, write to your Customer Success Manager indicating that it’s an integration with Person Accounts.
Check the integration’s phone lookup field: it has to be the same field where the numbers of your existing Person Accounts are stored. If it points to another field, Treble doesn’t find them and creates a new one every time.Also check that no block has “Create a new object” enabled on Account.

​
Next steps

Record types

The mechanism behind almost all of these problems.

Advanced settings

What can be set at the moment of creation.