Related Accounts and Related Contacts

The purpose of this article, Related Accounts and Contacts, is to describe common issues with merging Salesforce Accounts and Contacts where the Account Setting Allow users to relate contacts to multiple accounts is enabled.

When Contacts to Multiple Accounts is enabled a new standard object AccountContactRelation becomes visible which stores the various relationships between accounts and contacts; either the direct and implicit Contact parent Account or indirect and explicitly added relationships with optionally one or more role. The relationships are managed via the Related Accounts and Related Contacts related lists which can be added to the Contact and Account page layouts respectively.

Follow these steps to enable ‘Allow users to relate contacts to multiple accounts’:

1. Click on Setup.
2. Search for Account Settings.
3. Select Edit.
4. Tick the checkbox ‘Allow users to relate a contact to multiple accounts’.
5. Click on Save.

When Account and Contact records are merged the following considerations apply to the handling of relationships.

Contact Merge

1. Indirect Account relationships are reparented.
2. Direct Account relationships are lost: indirect Account relationships are not added to the winning Contact for the losing Contact direct Account relationships.
3. If multiple indirect relationships exist to the same Account then the merge will fail with the error below.

MERGE_FAILED, These contacts have the same related account. Open the related account record and remove redundant account–contact relationships. Then try merging again.

Account Merge

1. Indirect Contact relationships are reparented.
2. Direct Contact relationships are retained: indirect Contact relationships are added to the winning Account for the losing Account direct Contact relationships. This behaviour is controlled by the setting “When users replace the primary account on a contact record” shown in the first screenshot.
3. If multiple indirect relationships exist to the same Contact then the merge will fail with the error below.

MERGE_FAILED, These accounts have the same related contact. Open the related contact record and remove redundant account–contact relationships. Then try merging again.

In summary, there are 2 issues to be mitigated; data loss where the previous parent Account relationship is lost (for losing records) when Contacts are merged (Contact point 2) and the technical error where duplicate indirect relationships exist across the records being merged (points 3). In both cases a manual process is typically required either to recreate or deduplicate relationship records respectively. OneMerge Summer ’24 provides a complete solution to both issues which ensures that relationships are managed correctly across all automated or manual merge operations.

If you require any assistance with OneMerge and Related Accounts and Contacts, please contact us at hello@onemerge.co.uk.

Article last reviewed: 2025-10-29