Salesforce is, at it's very base level, a giant spreadsheet with multiple columns, rows, and sheets. It can be so much more, as we will demonstrate, but at it's heart it's a giant Excel spreadsheet. As such, a lot of the basic descriptors pull from Excel terminology.
- Object: Each Object is essentially a sheet on a spreadsheet - instead of Sheet 1 and Sheet 2, you have Accounts and Contacts. Objects include Accounts, Contacts, Campaigns, Campaign Members, Opportunities, Projects, Project Visitors, Project Contacts, and Resources. We have set up your homepage so that the list of Objects you see on your view should be those you use most frequently, as demonstrated below:
- Standard Objects: objects native to Salesforce that cannot fully be edited (we can add fields but standard object fields cannot be altered):
- Accounts: Households or Organizations. Accounts are the highest level of the hierarchy and every Contact must have an Account associated with it. All Contacts should have Household Accounts
- Parent vs. Child Accounts – any Account that has a connection above or another has what is known as a Parent-Child Relationship. Examples would include a Senator’s office as the child to the U.S. Senate.
- Contacts: Any individual we have connections with.
- Campaigns: Events, Councils, Memberships, or other groupings of individuals not related to Projects.
- Opportunities: Donations, payments for events, or any other monetary tracking.
- Accounts: Households or Organizations. Accounts are the highest level of the hierarchy and every Contact must have an Account associated with it. All Contacts should have Household Accounts
- Custom Objects: objects we have created for the purposes of ensuring Meridian-based best practices.
- Projects: details for any projects – IVLP, GC, MCCD projects go here
- Project Visitors: Any participant on a Project.
- Project Contacts: Anyone involved in a Project that are not Visitors – interpreters, liaisons, travel contacts, third party managers, etc.
- Resources: Accounts that are associated with a project - usually as Vendors.
- Itineraries: Itineraries are predemonantly used to track City Stops and Site Visits.
- Note that Project Contacts and Project Visitors must exist as Contacts, and Resources must exist as Vendors before you can add them as connections to the Project.
- Standard Objects: objects native to Salesforce that cannot fully be edited (we can add fields but standard object fields cannot be altered):
- Fields are the columns of your spreadsheet, with each cell in that column being the individual entry.
- For each Object we can have up to 500 different fields. If you ask for a new field, please let us know why you need the new field, and be prepared for us to figure out if we can't wrap what you need into an existing field!
- Records are the rows of your spreadsheet - the individual entries. Each individual Contact, Account, Project, etc. would be a Record.
- Record Types: each object has a variety of record types which determine what information can be entered and what information can be viewed by a given individual.
- Households and Organizations are the Record Types for Accounts. Each team will have different Record Types available to them to select, depending on your needs.
- Users: Meridian employees with Salesforce logins. Each user is assigned a Role and a Profile in Salesforce.
- Role: determines what information a user can see.
- Profile: determines what a user can do – when a user can see vs. edit, create, or delete fields and records.