Record Type Object Salesforce: Key Types and Best Practices

Salesforce is a Cloud-Based “Customer Relationship Management” (CRM) software. It enables businesses to use a full-fledged Customer Relationship Management software without spending much effort on building one. Salesforce follows a subscription-based model. Salesforce now offers many more services along with the original Customer Relationship Management service.

It offers Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Analytics Services, Business Process Automation Services, etc. Salesforce helps businesses in all activities of the Sales Process starting from acquiring leads, nurturing them, engaging them, and then finally converting them into customers and maintaining the Sales. Salesforce provides many options for businesses to customize the way they interact with it. This article deals with an important element of the customization possibility – Salesforce Record Type. In this article, you’ll be taken through Record Type Object Salesforce, its key types, and some of the best practices you may consider adopting.

Introduction to Salesforce

For plenty of Entrepreneurs, Business Owners, and Corporations, Salesforce is the king of CRM. Salesforce is the most popular and robust CRM Software used by online businesses. With a name that big, Salesforce CRM doesn’t compromise its reputation.

Salesforce will help you to accomplish several eCommerce goals saving you valuable time by automating a lot of your Marketing Efforts and increasing your Sales. Salesforce lets you monitor and keep track of your Customer Data and Buying Patterns. You can also generate Sales Forecast Reports with Salesforce to convert your Leads. Salesforce also supports Email Integration with applications like Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, etc. Salesforce has a variety of pricing options, ranging from $25 to about $300 per user monthly.

Check out our Ultimate Guide on Salesforce.

You can also use Automated Tools like Hevo Data to simplify your Salesforce ETL and further load data from Salesforce to a Data Warehouse of your choice.

Understanding Record Type Object Salesforce

Record Type Object Salesforce plays a key role in the implementation of Business Process Workflows. Salesforce Record Type offers a way to customize objects for different use cases. For someone who is new to Salesforce, both statements are confusing. To clear the confusion, let’s understand the basics first.

Salesforce stores its data as “Objects”. There are standard objects that deal with the configuration and default “Data Types” that Salesforce provides. Then, there is the provision to implement custom objects. Implementing your Business Process Workflow in Salesforce almost always requires custom objects. Salesforce Record Type offers a way to present the same objects differently to different users based on the role they play.

For example, consider a company that sells a software product to both individual customers and business customers. Let’s say the company has a custom object called “Customer”. Such a company will need the custom object to be displayed differently to people who work with enterprise customers and individual customers respectively. For example, the business customer may need a business address and company owner details as mandatory fields. The individual customer may need a different set of mandatory parameters like a home address as mandatory fields. Salesforce Record Type helps organizations in implementing such requirements. Based on the record type, objects like “Order” can be customized to have different page layouts, picklist values, etc.

Record Type Object Salesforce: Key Types

We have now learned that Salesforce Record Type is a great way of creating multiple views of the same object. In other words, the Salesforce Record Type helps us to slice objects in different ways to eventually present them to various kinds of audiences. The use of record type is not just limited to custom objects. Salesforce allows the use of record type with most of the common standard objects as well. Here is a list of Record Type Object Salesforce.

• Account
• Campaign
• CampaignMember
• Case
• Contact
• Contract
• Lead
• Opportunity
• QuickText
• Solution
• Custom Objects

To specify a record type for these objects, client applications can edit the “RecordTypeId” field of the above objects.

Record Type Object Salesforce: Create Different Page Layouts

Let us now try to understand the broad steps involved in implementing different “page layouts” for the same object to be presented to different profiles. 

As discussed earlier, record type objects are closely associated with the user profiles that use them. So, for different profiles to view different page layouts, we need to assign the specific record type and layout to the required profile.

Let us try to do this for the earlier example. Let there be two profiles – one is a Retail Sales Agent and the second one is the Enterprise Sales Agent. To present different page layouts to different user profiles, follow the below-mentioned steps:

1. Head over to the “Setup Section”, click on “Object Manager”, select “Knowledge” and click on “Page Layouts”. Click on “New” and you will see a screen where you can create a page layout. Name the layout as ‘Retail’.
2. Similarly, navigate to “Object Manager” and create an ‘Enterprise’ layout.
3. Now, head back to “Object Manager”, click on “Record Types”, and select “New”. Enter a label for your record type and select the profile that will use this record type. For our case, select the ‘Retail Sales Agent’ profile.
4. In the same “Record Types” section, there will be an option to select the page layout. Select the ‘Retail’ layout here and click on “Save”. This means any user with the profile ‘Retail Sales Agent’ will now see the ‘Retail’ layout. 
5. Repeat the process for configuring the ‘Enterprise’ layout for Enterprise Sales Agents. 

The above set of steps gives you an idea about how to use Salesforce Record Type to present different page layouts to different profiles. Now that we know what is possible using record type objects, let us learn about some of the best practices while using Salesforce Record Type.

Record Type Object Salesforce: Best Practices

Salesforce is an easy-to-use CRM platform, and you would want to get the best out of it. Here are some of the best practices that you may adopt while using Record Type Object Salesforce.

• Salesforce recommends that you do not use too many record type objects. It limits the ideal number of record types to 200. That said, 200 is more than enough even for the most complex Business Process Workflows. 
• Use record types only when you think there are objects that need to follow different workflows for different profiles. Record type objects are not a mechanism to ensure the security or to implement access control. They are strictly for implementing different workflows and to present different views of the same object to different profiles.
• Records with specific record types are not hidden to the profiles for which they are not enabled. A record type enabled for a profile only means that the user can create records of that particular type. If you need to control access to different records based on profiles, writing sharing rules using record types is the solution.
• While creating record types and page layouts, it is always better to use templates of existing record types or the Master Record Type that already exists.

Conclusion

Salesforce Record Type provides an excellent mechanism for differentiating the same object to different users. It allows users to present different perspectives and different process flows for the same object. Having this ability is key to implementing your complex Business Process Workflows in Salesforce.

If you are an advanced user of Salesforce, you are most probably dealing with a lot of data sources, both internally and from other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings. Having all this data in one place helps in analysis and accelerates the Decision-Making Process. Accomplishing this requires integration to all such third-party apps and services. Salesforce’s Scheduled Data Load is a recommended approach by Salesforce. But this approach can be ineffective when you’re dealing with a large number of diverse data sources. In such cases, Hevo Data can be a great asset in your ETL tool portfolio.

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Hevo Data, with its strong integration with 100+ Sources & BI tools such as Salesforce, allows you to not only export data from sources & load data in the destinations, but also transform & enrich your data, & make it analysis-ready so that you can focus only on your key business needs and perform insightful analysis using BI tools. You can easily extract data from Salesforce using Hevo to track the performance of your business and optimize it further to increase revenue.

Give Hevo Data a try and sign up for a 14-day free trial today. Hevo offers plans & pricing for different use cases and business needs, check them out!

Do you use Salesforce? Share your experience of working with Record Type Object Salesforce in the comments section below.