A Contact and Contract Conundrum

I mean, who hasn't mistaken a Contract for a Contact. It's just one little 'r' after all. But alas, this story runs deeper than than my increasing need for reading glasses. This is for those of you that use the standard Contract object...

Contracts have a few critical components:

• WHAT is being agreed to

• WHEN does the contract start/end

• and WHO agreed to the contract

The Contract object contains several standard fields:

While the Company Signed By is a lookup to a Salesforce User, the Customer Signed By is a lookup to a Contact.

What is curious is the Customer Signed Title field. As highlighted above, it is set to 40 characters. This might be reasonable for most people, but what if your customer is the Principal Scientific Research Director in Artificial Intelligence? Luckily, that title will fit in the standard Contact object field Title.

So, how is an unsuspecting Salesforce Administrator supposed to maintain data integrity with these conflicting field lengths? Sadly this appears to be an oversight in development many years ago. And I suspect it's not a problem for that many people. I did open a case with Salesforce support to see if the field can be modified to increase the length, but that was not possible.

In my use case, I am creating contacts from an external CPQ tool and populating the Customer Signed By fields. My integration would throw errors occasionally, because of the field length mismatch. I had to create a custom Customer Signed Title field with a length of 128 to capture the full title information on the Contract record.

But, Spring '24 is right around the corner! And with it, the ability to place related object fields on lightning pages. I haven't been able to test this feature, but theoretically, we can put the contact's title field on the Contract record page. Can't wait to post part 2 and show the results

Add Fields from Related Objects to Dynamic Forms-Enabled Pages