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Customer Table that can be Business(Account) and Individual(contacts)

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Posted on by PN-05090429-0

Hi Community

I have built an app using Sharepoint but like to transfer to the Dataverse. When I created my app, I created a Customer table that you can add Name, First Name, Last Name and a choice column for Type (LLC, Inc., Partnerships, Trust, Individual). I wrote a patch that would concat first and last name to Name. In my app, the user can add both all types of borrower to the application.

With the Dataverse, there is an Account table and Contact. When they chose the type, I guess I can have them enter data to either the Account or Contact table but in real life, a contact can be associated with multiple company. For example, I have multiple business so I can be owner of each.

Is there a better way to build out this data? I can't get my head wrap around it. Please help.

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Microsoft Dataverse with Power Apps

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Drew Poggemann 9,287 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @pnguyen124 ,

The default relationship between the Account and the Contact in Dataverse is a System relationship that is basically setup like a parent / child. A Contact can be setup as with only one Account in this relationship.

This does not mean that you could not add another relationship that would be an N:N relationship though. This could allow you to setup multiple Contacts for an Account and a Contact related to multiple Accounts. You can set this up by adding a new Many-to-many relationship between these two tables.

Another option is you could setup your own custom intersect table in-between the Account and Contact calling the table something like Account Contact and this would have a lookup to the Account, a lookup to the Contact and you could add other columns / metadata to this table that might define the relationship of the Contact to the Account.

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Fubar 8,338 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Also, in addition to dpoggemann's response, it is common to add a new many-to-many relationship between Contact and Account to cater for the scenario where a person is related to many different accounts. There is also Connections functionality that allows linking of various records e.g. can link contacts and mark as Siblings or someone as an owner of an organization https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customerengagement/on-premises/basics/create-connections-view-relationships-between-records?view=op-9-1 (but just be aware it is a complex data structure which can complicate some things later depending on what you are doing)

When using the Contact and Account tables, you can also configure a "Customer Lookup" on other Tables which will allow the user to populate the Lookup field with either a Contact or Account record.

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