Salesforce Page Layouts and Record Types

Page Layouts. 

Below I’ll talk about some of the different components that comprise a Record Page.

Page Layout Components

Details Component and Areas

Let’s start with what Salesforce calls the “Details” component. This is the component that displays the fields.

You may have noticed that there are headings above many of the fields. Each of these is an “Area”, which is simply a grouping of fields. I’ve highlighted the Area headings below in red.

Area titles and fields in those areas are customizable. 

Also, if you click on an area’s heading, it will hide or show its fields. So, this is what it looks like with the “Client Details” and “Additional Info” Areas hidden (you see the area title but not the fields within it)

Related Records

The related record component displays related records connected to the primary record. You’ve seen a few examples of related records so far. This screenshot shows one, Income.

This screenshot below shows two different related records, Addresses and Employments.

Events and Activities

The Events and Activities component allows you to add “activities” like events, tasks, emails, and logged phone calls.

Files

The Files component allows for uploading (via dragging-and-dropping or selecting) files.

Status Bar (aka “Path” Bar)

There’s a component that is a highly customizable status bar. Salesforce calls it a “Path Bar”.

In addition to showing the status of a client, it can also highlight relevant fields and provide helpful text. This is customizable and set to your needs. 

For example, in this Salesforce system, a client set to “New” on the status bar will display the “Key Fields” of Email, Phone, Mailing Address, and Newsletter Subscriber (highlighted in yellow on the left). 

The status bar displays these fields at the top (highlighted in yellow), AND they are also still shown down below in the Details component where they normally are (Email and Phone highlighted in green).

You can add whatever text you want under the “Guidance for Success” section of the status bar (highlighted above in yellow on the right).

And you can set different fields and guidance for each step on the status bar. You can see there are different Key Fields and Guidance when the status is set to “Intake” (from a status of “New”, which we were just looking at). The "Key Fields" can be updated as the status bar is updated.

Highlights Panel

You’ve been seeing the Highlights component all along if you've been reading through this "Intro Series – Salesforce for Nonprofits" sequentially. There are two parts to the Highlights component. 

Highlighted Fields

The first is what Salesforce calls the “Highlighted Fields” which I have also circled below in red. Right now, the Highlighted Fields include “Contact Owner” and “Account Name”. Note that you view these fields both here on the Highlights component AND in their location below in the Details component. (Please also note that you cannot always edit these fields from the Highlights component – you mostly need to edit these fields from the Details component).

The Highlights component is very customizable. You can put whatever fields you find most important here at the top where they’re easiest to view.

The screenshot below shows different Highlighted Fields.

Buttons

The second section of the Highlights component contains buttons. Buttons can be created to do a variety of different actions. There are also a great number of buttons that come out-of-the-box, including the ones below, which I’ll describe in greater detail.

The “Clone” button makes a duplicate of the current record.

The “Edit” and “Delete” button do exactly what you think they would. 

The “Follow” button allows you to see posts and updates about this record on something called “Chatter” which I’ll cover in a later post.

The “Printable View” button will open up a printable version of the record.

This “Printable View” includes all the items under the different tabs, including all visible related records (“Addresses” is an example of a related record in the screenshot below). The printable version isn’t particularly pretty, but it gets the job done.

The last button to mention here is the “Change Record Type” button. In order to explain this button, I’ll introduce the topic of “Record Types”.

Record Types

Salesforce allows for different page layouts for the same “Object” (i.e. “Contacts”) when using Record Types.

For example, most organizations are going to have different kinds of Contacts. Let’s say we’re tracking Clients (folks who we’re providing services to), Household Members (of Clients), Donors, and Vendors. They’re all contacts, but we’re going to want to track different kinds of information for these four different types of Contacts. 

• Clients – Demographic info and other info relevant to our programs such as previous addresses, employment history, program goals, and outcomes
• Household Members (of our clients) – similar information as clients but much less needed (no related records required)
• Donors – attendance at our events and donations
• Vendors – multiple communication methods including multiple email addresses, multiple phone numbers, fax numbers, and more information about the business, rather than just the individual.

We could just throw every single field and component onto a single Page Layout for all Contacts, but this would be complicated and hard to navigate.

For example, if we’re looking at the contact for a lawyer, do we really want to see a field for their birthdate or SSN? If we're looking at a client, do we want to see a field for a fax number? Probably not. And our clients, household members, and vendors typically don’t make donations, so space on the page layout dedicated to donations doesn’t make sense. Including all fields would mean a lot of empty fields and empty related record components everywhere.

Luckily, Salesforce has Record Types.

An “object”, like Contacts, can have multiple Record Types. 

In our example, we want to create four different Record Types for Contacts: (1) Client, (2) Household, (3) Donor, and (4) Vendor. We assign each of our Contacts the correct Record Type based on who they are and then create different page layouts for each of these different Record Types.

We’ve seen the “Client” Page Layout and Record Type throughout this post. Here’s what the Page Layout looks like for each different Record Types.

Household

Donor

Vendor

As you can see, Record Types are an extremely useful way to customize your Salesforce database to you and your needs.

But there’s another dimension to Record Types that make them even more useful, and that’s combining Record Types with user Profiles.

User Profiles

Anyone logging into Salesforce has an assigned Profile. One’s profile determines WHAT one is able to do and see in the Salesforce database. 

Let’s say we have four different categories of folks using Salesforce who have different responsibilities.

• Admin Assistance – data entry and maintaining current contact information.

• Program Staff – providing client service, maintaining up-to-date info on their clients, inputting case notes and time logs for time spent on client work.

• Development Staff – running fundraising events, building relationships with donors, tracking donation information

• Executive Staff – overseeing and managing everything

We can turn these into Profiles, combine them with the Record Types, and now have even greater customizability when determining what a user can view and edit in your Salesforce database.

Controlling the Page Layout

Let’s start with Admin Assistance. We want people with this profile to be able to view all Contacts regardless of the Record Type, but we only want them to be able to view the communications-related fields on the “Client” and “Donor” Record Types (i.e., no “SSN” field, no Donation information fields, etc.). So, we customize page layouts for clients and donors so that folks with the Admin Assistance profile only sees the fields that are pertinent to their work.

Here’s what an Admin profile sees when looking at Tim, a Donor. None of the fundraising information is visible to them, only the contact information is. Don’t worry though – all that data is still in the database. It just isn’t currently visible to this profile.

Same thing when looking at clients. Here’s what the Admin staff sees when looking at Liam’s record. Notice how the SSN, Desired Counties, and Favorite Color fields are not displayed. Another thing to note is that the “Birthdate” field (highlighted below) is *viewable* by the Admin staff, but it’s not editable. The editable fields have light-gray pencil icons (circled in red), indicating the user can edit them.

Here’s a slightly darker version of the pencil icon that you can see more clearly.

But the Birthdate field above doesn’t have one (and the “Age” field will never have one because it’s a calculated field and never directly editable).

This was an example of the ability to control what a Profile can both view and edit, unique to their role.

Controlling Access to Record Types

Let’s also say that we don’t want Program Staff to accidentally create contacts with the Donor Record Type, and we don’t want any Fundraising/Development Staff to create contacts with the Client Record Type. Profiles allows this kind of control. We simply turn off the Record Type of “Donor” for the Program Staff Profile and likewise for Fundraising/Development Staff and Record Type of “Client”.

And if we want to go even further, we can add a few other settings so that Program Staff and Admin Assistance will not be able to see ANY Contacts with the Record Type of “Donor”, if we wanted to keep that information even more private. 

And to provide an even more granular example, we could change the SSN field so that Development Staff can never see that field at all – not even the last four digits. 

What people can view and edit is very, very customizable!

Closing

Congrats! You now have a working understanding Page Layout, RecordTypes, and Profiles – and how they work together to affect viewing/editing.

Book a free 15 minute call with me to chat about your organization and how to best manage your data. 

And also please keep reading to dive deeper into what Salesforce has to offer! 

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