Relationship Group
A Relationship Group in Salesforce Financial Services Cloud is a way to bundle related people and businesses, most often a family household, so an advisor sees the whole picture instead of one isolated account.
Definition
A Relationship Group in Salesforce Financial Services Cloud is a way to bundle related people and businesses, most often a family household, so an advisor sees the whole picture instead of one isolated account. Under the hood it is a business account tied to a Party Relationship Group record, with each member connected through an Account Contact Relationship.
The pattern lets a bank or wealth firm think at the household level rather than per client. A married couple, their children, a family trust, and the attorney who advises them can all sit inside one group, and financial data can roll up across everyone in it.
How Financial Services Cloud builds a household from groups
Groups, households, and the underlying objects
Financial Services Cloud does not store a household as a single special object. It builds one from standard and industry objects working together. The group itself is a business account, and what marks that account as a household is its link to a Party Relationship Group record whose type is Household. Change that type and the same structure becomes a trade association, a board, or a list of top customers instead. Individual people are usually Person Accounts, which combine an Account and a Contact into one record. Each person joins the group through an Account Contact Relationship that points from the member to the group account. That junction carries the member role, an active flag, and whether the person is the primary member. Related objects such as Account Account Relationship, Contact Contact Relationship, and Party Role Relationship capture connections that are not plain membership, like one client being another client's attorney. Knowing which object holds which fact matters when you write reports, build automation, or design Actionable Relationship Center graphs on top of the data.
Primary group and primary member
Two designations cause the most confusion, so they are worth pinning down. A Person Account can belong to several relationship groups at once. A client might sit in a family household, a small business they co-own, and a charitable board, all at the same time. Only one of those groups can be the person's primary group, though. The primary group is the default context that surfaces first on the client's record and drives much of the household-level rollup behavior. Inside a single group, exactly one member can be flagged as the primary member. This is the anchor person for that group, often the main account holder or the head of the household. The primary member is not the same idea as the primary group. One describes which member leads a group, the other describes which group leads for a member. Getting these straight keeps your reporting honest, because a careless setup can leave a household with no primary member or a client with two groups both claiming to be primary, and rollups then behave in ways nobody expects.
Members versus related contacts
When you build a group, Financial Services Cloud separates two kinds of people. Members are the people who actually belong to the household, like a spouse and children who share finances. Related contacts are outside parties who advise or interact with the group without being part of it, such as an attorney, an accountant, or a power of attorney. Both kinds attach through relationship records, but they play different roles. A member gets a household role and counts toward household composition. A related contact gets a relationship role through a Party Role Relationship, for example a Client-Attorney pairing, and does not fold into the family's financial totals. This split keeps the household view clean. The advisor sees who the money belongs to in one place and who supports the family in another. It also matters for sharing and privacy, because an external attorney should see only what their role allows, not the full financial summary of every household member.
Rolling up financial accounts to the household
The payoff of grouping is the household-level view of money. Financial Services Cloud aggregates each member's financial accounts so an advisor reads total deposits, investments, and liabilities for the whole household rather than adding them up by hand. The Account Financial Summary object holds these aggregated figures, and a set of predefined Data Processing Engine definitions does the heavy calculation on a schedule. This is why advisors care about clean group membership. If a daughter's brokerage account is not linked into the household, her assets never appear in the family total, and the advisor underestimates the relationship. If a former spouse is left in the group after a divorce, the totals are overstated. The rollup is only as accurate as the membership and the active flags behind it. On the page, results often appear through a Related Records Detail Display component that reads from the summary object, so the household record becomes a single financial snapshot of every person in it.
Seeing the group through the Actionable Relationship Center
Relationship groups feed the Actionable Relationship Center, or ARC, which is the visual side of this data model. Instead of clicking between separate account records to reconstruct who is connected to whom, an advisor opens an ARC Relationship Graph and sees the household and its links laid out as an interactive map. People, businesses, and the relationships between them appear as nodes and connections that can be expanded in place. ARC reads the same objects described above, so the quality of the graph depends entirely on how the group is set up. A well-maintained household with correct member roles and related-contact links produces a clear, useful picture. A neglected one produces gaps. Admins can build custom ARC graphs from standard and custom objects and drop the graph component onto Lightning record pages. A Relationship Group List component can also show a person's groups directly on their record, giving a quick text-based companion to the graph for users who want the list rather than the map.
Modern model versus the legacy managed package
The name Relationship Groups has history, and it pays to know which version someone means. An older Relationship Groups managed package shipped years ago to organize Person Accounts into households in Salesforce Classic, and some long-running orgs still carry it. The current approach in Financial Services Cloud and other industry clouds is the Group Membership and Households data model built on Party Relationship Group and Account Contact Relationship, which is more flexible and works in Lightning Experience with ARC. The two can look similar from a distance because both gather people into households, but they are not the same plumbing. New implementations should use the current group membership model rather than the legacy package. If you inherit an org with the old managed package, treat any migration as a real project, because the objects and rollup mechanics differ. When you read Salesforce Help, check whether an article describes the managed-package setup or the newer group membership flow, since the steps and the objects are not interchangeable.
Set up relationship groups in Financial Services Cloud
Relationship groups are part of the Financial Services Cloud data model. An admin turns on the underlying features and configures the pieces so advisors can build households. The exact menu labels shift by release and by which Financial Services Cloud edition you run, so confirm names in Setup for your org.
- Confirm Financial Services Cloud and prerequisites
Make sure Financial Services Cloud is provisioned, Person Accounts are enabled, and Contacts to Multiple Accounts is on so the Account Contact Relationship object is available. These are the foundations the group model sits on.
- Enable the group membership features
In Setup, turn on the group membership and household features for your org. Depending on the edition this appears under the Financial Services Cloud or Group Membership settings. This activates the Party Relationship Group and related objects.
- Set up record types and roles
Configure the Account record types for individuals and groups, and review the group member roles and party role relationship values your business uses, such as Decision Maker, Influencer, or Client-Attorney.
- Surface groups on the page
Add the Relationship Group List component and an Actionable Relationship Center Relationship Graph to your Lightning record pages so advisors can view and build households without leaving the account.
- Schedule the financial rollups
Review the predefined Data Processing Engine definitions that populate the Account Financial Summary object, and schedule them so household-level totals stay current.
Sets what the group represents. Household is the common value; other types model trade groups, boards, or top-customer lists.
Marks one group as the default context for a Person Account when that person belongs to more than one group.
Flags the anchor person inside a single group, typically the head of household or main account holder.
Describes how a member relates to the group, used for both household members and external related contacts.
- A Person Account can be in many groups but only one can be its primary group; setting two primary groups breaks the default-context behavior.
- Members and related contacts are different. Putting an outside attorney in as a member can wrongly fold them into household financial totals.
- Household rollups are only as accurate as membership and active flags, so stale members left in after a life event skew the numbers.
- The legacy Relationship Groups managed package is not the same as the current group membership model; confirm which one your org runs before following a Help article.
Prefer this walkthrough as its own page? How to Relationship Group in Salesforce, step by step
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Relationship Group.
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Relationship Group.
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
Test your knowledge
Q1. What does a Relationship Group do in Salesforce Financial Services Cloud?
Q2. Why are Relationship Groups foundational to wealth management in Financial Services Cloud?
Q3. Which records does a Relationship Group commonly bring together into one view?
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