An individual customer is one person doing business in their own name. A company customer is a business or organization that can have several people acting for it.
The difference matters because the system needs to know where shared company history ends and each person's own contact information begins.
What Does an Individual Customer Record Represent?
For an individual customer, the commercial relationship belongs directly to the person.
Examples include a person booking a room for themselves, joining a fitness program, renting a space personally, or paying for their own service.
Salesforce can represent individual consumers with Person Accounts when that model is enabled. A Person Account combines account and contact information into a person-focused record.
What Does a Company Customer Record Represent?
For a company customer, the organization is the main business account. People who work for or represent the company are connected as contacts.
The company record can hold shared information such as:
- Company name and billing details.
- Contracts and commercial terms.
- Bookings made for the organization.
- Invoices and balances.
- Related employees, coordinators, or decision-makers.
Can the Person Booking Be Different From the Customer Paying?
Yes. A company may pay while an employee stays, attends, or uses the service.
For example, a company can be the customer and payer, an office manager can make the booking, and several employees can be the guests or participants.
Customer, contact, payer, guest, and participant are roles. They do not always belong to one person.
What if One Person Works With Several Companies?
The person should not automatically be duplicated just because they have several business relationships.
Salesforce supports connecting one contact to multiple business accounts so the different relationships can be tracked while the person's core contact record stays consistent.
How Does Booking Ninjas Use This Structure?
Because Booking Ninjas is built on Salesforce, it can use Salesforce account and contact relationships to connect customer identity with bookings, billing, service, and operations.
The exact model should be chosen during implementation. A business-to-business operation may rely mainly on business accounts and contacts. A consumer-focused operation may use an individual-oriented model.
For the continuing history behind the relationship, see Customer Record and How One Customer Can Hold Multiple Bookings. For system ownership, see Which System Should Hold Customer Information?.
Sources and Further Reading
- Salesforce Help: Manage Accounts and Contacts — explains business accounts, person accounts, and contacts.
- Salesforce Help: Contacts to Multiple Accounts — explains how one person can be connected to several business accounts without duplicate contact records.