Understanding People Types - Contacts and Individuals

Learning Team

Overview

Practifi provides two different types of records to represent the people your firm interacts with: Contacts and Individuals. This flexibility helps ensure that each person's relationship and impact on your firm are captured accurately, so your team can manage every relationship with the right level of detail. This article outlines the two types of person records in your organization and the considerations surrounding them.

Occasionally, Practifi Administrators may need to edit or add data for this and other objects. For more information on handling bulk data operations, please review our articles on Using Salesforce Inspector Reloaded and Using Data Upload Templates.

Choosing a Person Type
Creating New Records
Record Page Differences
Switching Between Types
Considerations

Choosing a Person Type

The two types of person records you will encounter within Practifi are Contacts and Individuals. Contacts are a simpler type of record that exist only as members of a Household or Organization, which is the entity your firm does business with directly. Individuals are people with whom your firm has a relationship, independent of any Household or Organization. They might not be part of a household or organization and instead are managed as an entity in their own right. However, they can also exist as a member alongside other Contacts and Individuals.

When deciding whether to capture someone as a Contact or Individual, consider whether the firm has a direct business relationship with that person. These direct relationships are kept in Practifi as definitions, and the ability to add definitions to a person, along with the functionality they unlock, is the major difference between Contacts and Individuals.

For example, the spouse of the primary member in a Household is typically stored as a Contact because the firm deals with the household as a single entity. However, if that person has investments separate from the household you also manage, you'd want them to be an Individual so they can be defined as a Client with their own deals, services, and assets.

Creating New Records

The system selects default people types for you based on where the person is being captured:

When creating a new household or organization member, such as from the Create a Household/Organization global actions or the Add New Member record page actions, these members are created as Contacts.
When creating a person in isolation, such as from the Create an Individual global action, these people are created as Individuals.

Record Page Differences

The need for additional features on the Individual record page also means that the record pages for each person type differ significantly. Being simpler by nature, Contacts have a single-column layout that's always viewed as a subtab within its parent Household or Organization record.

Individuals, on the other hand, are often accessed directly from app pages such as Directory, Clients, and Pipeline, and are given their own workspace tab by default:

If they're also a Household or Organization member, then they'll appear in member lists on those record pages as well. Opening the Individual from this location displays it as a subtab, as with Contacts.

If you open an Individual as a subtab but would rather give the record its own workspace, click the arrow in the subtab to access a drop-down menu and select the Set as Workspace Tab action.

Switching Between Types

Relationships can change over time, and someone you created as a Contact may need to be converted to an Individual in the future as their relationship with your firm evolves. When this happens, the Convert to Individual action ensures that the person and their related records are converted safely, so the history attached to those records stays with them as their role in your firm evolves. This is selected from the page actions on the Contact record.

Once selected, you will be prompted with a pop-up menu asking you to confirm the conversion to an Individual record. Click Next to proceed.

Please note: This action is irreversible; Individuals cannot be converted back into Contacts.

Considerations

The Remove from Household & Organization actions are only available to Individuals, as Contacts cannot exist independently of a parent entity. To remove a Contact, convert it into an individual first.

When using either the Add to Household/Organization or the Add Household/Organization Member actions to add an existing individual as a member of a household or organization, you'll be asked a question: "Do you want to move this person's definitions - such as client, prospect, and influencer - to their new household/organization?" If the user opts to move definitions, then that Individual will be converted into a Contact as part of the transition.