Record Types are a feature of Salesforce CRM to allow you to provide different sets of object picklists, different page layouts, and custom business processes to specific users based on their profile. Record types can be used in various ways, for example:
- Create record types for opportunities to differentiate your internal sales deals from your field sales deals and show different fields and picklist values
- Create record types for leads to display different page layouts for your tele-sales leads versus your internal sales prospecting functions.
To create a record type:
The record type called Master is always set for every object and contains all the picklist and process options. It is not, however, listed under the record types list and it can be assigned as a record type for a profile, provided it is the only assigned record type for that profile.
Since each record type is assigned to one page layout type per profile, the numbers of page assignments can easily increase. So this means, if you have two custom record types for an account and five profiles, you will have fifteen page assignments (five×two for each custom record type, and five for the Master record type).
Selectable record types are assigned per profile and field-level security is configured separately for each record type. Consider the following when creating a record type:
- Which record types are associated with the current profile?
- If more than one record type, prompt user for record-type selection
- If only one, select that record type without prompting (this would be set as default)
- Based upon record type and profile, assign appropriate page layout
- Based upon record type, assign the appropriate process and picklist values
By associating different record types to different page layouts, fields and picklist values you can formulate a set of object-specific processes and in Salesforce CRM the following are available:
- The Lead process using the Lead object which is governed by the Status field which is configured to be open, closed, and so on.
- The Sales process which uses the Opportunity object and the fields Stage field (set to be won, lost etc.) plus the Amount and Probability fields.
- The Support process which uses the Case object and is controlled by the Case Status field which may be set to open, closed, and so on.
- The Solutions process which used the Solution object and and the fields Status which are set to be draft, deployed,and so on
Example: Your sales team creates an opportunity that represents a sales deal. Your sales support team then up sells on this deal. You can then create two sales processes with two different record types and two different page layouts: Sales and Support.
You would want to create a lookup relationship from opportunity to opportunity, and only require or display this relationship for the support team profile.
You would also be able to configure the sharing rules so that they could not modify each other's opportunities. This is covered in detail in Chapter 4, Data Management.