Salesforce Account fields: the standard field reference

The Salesforce Account object — the company or organization you do business with — ships with a set of standard fields every org has, before anyone adds a single custom one. This is what those fields are for, and the gotchas worth knowing. For the full table across Account, Contact, Opportunity, Lead, and Case, there's a complete standard-field reference you can keep open alongside this.

Identity and hierarchy

• Name (Text) — the account name. Straightforward, but it's the field everything else hangs off in reports and search.
• Type (Picklist) — customer, partner, competitor, prospect. A standard picklist you're expected to tailor to how your business actually segments accounts.
• ParentId (Lookup to Account) — the field that builds the account hierarchy. Point a subsidiary's ParentId at its headquarters and you get the parent-child rollup structure. It's easy to forget this is just a self-lookup on the object.
• OwnerId (Lookup to User) — who owns the account. It drives sharing and a lot of reporting, so it's rarely "just" a field.

Firmographics — the segmentation fields

• Industry (Picklist) — the sector the account operates in.
• AnnualRevenue (Currency) — estimated yearly revenue.
• NumberOfEmployees (Number) — headcount.

These three are the standard segmentation set. If your team slices the book of business by size or sector, this is where it comes from — and if these are empty, that's usually why the segmentation report looks thin.

Contact details — and the compound-field gotcha

• Phone (Phone) and Website (URL) — the account's main line and site.
• BillingAddress (Address) — here's the gotcha: this is a compound field, not a plain text field. It's a single addressable field made up of BillingStreet, BillingCity, BillingState, BillingPostalCode, and BillingCountry. You'll see the components individually in reports and the API, and ShippingAddress works the same way. Treating a compound address like one text field is a common source of confusion when building automation or integrations.

Source and rating

• AccountSource (Picklist) — how the account originated.
• Rating (Picklist) — Hot / Warm / Cold, the standard prospect-rating field.

The honest catch — this is the standard set, not your Account

Every field above exists in every Salesforce org, identically. What makes your Account object yours is everything layered on top: the custom fields (the __c ones) your team added over the years, the standard fields you quietly repurposed, and the ones nobody populates anymore. A generic reference can't describe those — they only exist in your org.

That's the boundary. This reference makes you fluent in the standard Account fields; seeing your org's actual Account — custom fields described, which fields are even used, who can read the sensitive ones — is a different question about your specific metadata. That's what SchemaForce answers: it inventories every field on Account (standard and custom), gives each a plain-language description, and shows usage and field-level security, so "what's on our Account object and what does it mean" stops being tribal knowledge. (Naming those custom fields so they're findable is its own discipline — the naming conventions standard covers it.)