Introduction to Record Type

Understanding what Record types are can be very confusing in the beginning but when you start relating them with your day to day activities it becomes easier to grasp the concept behind it. I like to visually relate things, as it helps to retain information and makes sense of what you hear. Isn't it true? Images always float around in the head.

As an example, consider a family that has a mom, dad and kids. Mom and dad work in the office and kids go to the college. Each one of them decides to record their monthly expenditure for better budget planning. Dad takes care of major expenses like house loan, bills etc. Mom takes care of household chores and kids go to school. As an admin can you help setting them up in Salesforce?

In Salesforce an object is a container to store data, monthly expenditure is your object. Your target audience is mom, dad and kids. While they want to record their monthly expenditure at the same time, it is not necessary that all of them will record their expenditure in the same way. For example kids would like to record books, stationery, tuition fees, pocket money, miscellaneous items etc. Dad wants to track home loan, car loan, phone bills etc. Mom would like to record grocery shopping, medical, household stuff etc. Imagine all of them drafting their data on a page? The pages would not be identical right? You don’t want to create same page for everyone in Salesforce. You have 3 types of audience and you might want to create 3 different page layouts for your object “Monthly Expenditure”.

With the help of record types, you connect the page layouts to your target audience.

Record types allow you to specify categories of records that display different page layouts. You are tailoring the information according to the user so that they don’t see too much of the information. Record types are the keys to the page layouts. Page-layout visually represents the data in the form of fields. For every object you will have a master record type defined. Access to record types are defined on profile. Kids may not have access to Loan record type certainly the page layout either and this will be defined on their profile. Mom may have access to loan record type but the default record type defined for her would be Grocery. 

Good to Know:

• Default record type is defined on profiles
• Users can pick the record types before they create a record.
• During data upload if a user does not specify the record type than the data loader picks the default record type defined on the profile. 
• We can use workflow rules to update the record type and flip page layout of a record.