Short answer
In Financial Services Cloud, a household is an Account with the Household record type. Clients join it through Account Contact Relationships, usually as Person Accounts, and FSC rolls their financial accounts, activities and opportunities up to the household. Settle the client model, the primary member rule and the rollup method before you load any data.
What a household is in FSC
A household groups the people who make financial decisions together: spouses, partners, adult children, sometimes a trust or a family business. In Financial Services Cloud the household is an Account record with the Household record type. Each member is linked to it through an Account Contact Relationship (ACR), which carries the member's role and whether this household is the member's primary group.
The primary group matters because rollups follow it. A client can belong to more than one household, for example as a parent in one and a trustee in another, but their financial accounts and activities roll up to one primary household.
Decide these four things before you build
- Person Accounts or the Account and Contact model. Most wealth firms use Person Accounts because a client is a person, not a company. Enabling Person Accounts can't be reversed, so turn it on in a sandbox first and test your integrations and reports against it.
- The primary member and naming rule. Pick one format and apply it everywhere, for example "Smith, John and Mary Household". Decide who is primary when both spouses are clients, and write the rule down so advisors and integrations follow it.
- What rolls up and how. List the records that should appear on the household: financial accounts, balances, opportunities, tasks and events, cases. Then confirm which rollup tool your FSC version supports and whether it can keep up with your data volume.
- How businesses and trusts relate. Model a trust or operating business as its own Account, linked to people through ACRs with clear roles, instead of stuffing it into a household.
Load order for a migration
When you move households from Redtail, Wealthbox or a spreadsheet, load in this order and keep an external ID from the source system on every record:
- Household accounts
- Person Accounts (or Contacts)
- Account Contact Relationships, with roles and the primary group flag
- Financial accounts and financial account roles
- Activities, notes and documents
Turn off rollups and heavy automation during the bulk load, then recalculate once at the end. Rollups that fire on every inserted row cause record locking errors and slow loads.
Mistakes we see in rescues
- One household per person, so spouses never appear together and rollups double count.
- No primary group set, so balances roll up to the wrong household or nowhere.
- Household names typed by hand with five different formats.
- Custodian feeds creating new households on every sync because nobody mapped the feed's account IDs to existing records.
Official documentation
Frequently asked questions
Can a client belong to more than one household in Financial Services Cloud?
Yes. A person can be related to several households through Account Contact Relationships, but only one is their primary group, and rollups use the primary group.
Do we have to use Person Accounts with FSC?
No, but most wealth management firms do because each client is an individual. Enabling Person Accounts is permanent, so test it in a sandbox with your integrations before you turn it on in production.
Salesforce, HubSpot, Anthropic and OpenAI change their products often. Check the official documentation before you rely on a specific setting, limit or price.