Household as Account or Custom Entity

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I realize this question has come up before and I have read the previous (mostly older) posts on the subject. I am trying, as is usually recommended, to use the OOB entities for as much as possible. I am setting up a nonprofit organization and am debating between using the Account entity for both organizations and household OR creating a new Household entity (not preferred method as far as I can tell). Either setup would use Contacts as the individuals in a household. I'll use the relationship roles to allow the relationships between different contacts to be entered/displayed.

Based on the latest versions of Dynamics 365/CRM, has their been anyone setting up households a more effective way than in the Account entity? The only drawback so far is the confusion to end-users in a nonprofit by calling it an "Account" or even renaming it to "Organization".

Thanks everyone!

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KylieKiser 2,174 on at

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There are mixed opinions on reusing out of the box entities. The decision depends on a few things in my opinion: (1) do you see yourself using the OOB entity for its intended purpose? (i.e. would you ever need a "Household" and "Account"?) and (2) Are there any OOB features of that entity that you would need to disable to use it for this purpose?

We use the Account entity as "Household". We wanted all the same features of the "Account" such as linking to contacts, activities, opportunities, etc. So in our case it made sense to simply rename and then add additional fields.

I would recommend looking at the work needed to modify the Account for your needs vs the work needed to create a new Household. This is a good place to start to see which option is more feasible.

Let us know what you decide!

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Aric Levin - MVP 30,190 Moderator on at

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Hi Theo,

This is a good question and I have seen this done in various ways.

I think the main question that you should be asking is how you plan to use Households and Organizations, what information you are planning to capture in each, and what relationships they are going to have to other entities such as Contacts and Activities.

If both entities will require to capture similar information and have the same relationships with Contacts and Activities, you can definitely use the same entity, and set up a different form for each type of Account, so that you will have ACCOUNT - HOUSEHOLD and ACCOUNT - ORGANIZATION. The system will be automatically able to redirect to the correct form based on your selection.

You can have a business process flow (or just field on the form) that will have the Account Type field, and based on that selection, the application will modify the form that it redirects to. If that forms are not that different, just show/hide the tabs and sections based on this selection.

Hope this helps.

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Community Member on at

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Thanks Kylie. Very useful information. For now, I will also be going with Households as Accounts, leaving "Account" as the display name so that it can also be used for Companies (Organizations).

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Community Member on at

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Thanks Aric. The info on using different forms is very useful! I'll try this method and see how it works down the road. It sounds like the best approach is to include households as organizations and just modify forms, views and reports to reflect having both in that entity. Thanks to both of you for taking the time to give your advice!

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