So when you have been a Salesforce admin or consultant for a while, you will probably have spent quite a lot of time browsing the AppExchange looking for an app that will save you all that config time. As you browse, you come across some little gems that you file away in the back of your mind for future use. I was put onto this little gem by a colleague in Salesforce when a client brought this exact use case up.
So, when you have been an Salesforce Admin or a consultant for a while, you quickly learn that there are literally thousands of apps that help you extend the functionality in Salesforce without the need to build lots of custom objects, fields, automations, etc. These make our lives easier as Admins as you just investigate, validate, install (in sandbox), test, install for real (in production this time) and away you go!
And as an experienced Admin, you will have probably spent quite a bit of time browsing the AppExchange looking for an app that will save you all that config time. As you are browsing, you start to come across some little gems that you file away in the back of your mind for future use. I was put on to this little gem by a colleague in Salesforce when a client brought this exact use case up.
The app is called ‘Companies House Search’ and it does exactly what it says on the tin – it allows you to launch a simple Lightning Flow from an Account screen that allows you to easily and simply interrogate the Companies House database and pull through lots of lovely information about the business to enrich your Account record. You can even display the Filing History from their Companies House record on their Account record page. This could be a dream solution if you are in an industry that requires due diligence to be completed before you enter into contractual arrangements with a client, for example.
The actual setup is relatively simple if you know your way around the back of a Salesforce org. Let me just say up front that the Managed Package provides a custom Lightning Page Component which means that you will need to have MyDomain set up to view it. There is also a tricky little bit creating an API connection between Companies House but the instructions are very helpful to steer you through this. Once this is done, it is plain sailing as there are just a few bits of standard config that lay between us and all that rich data. First, you update the page layout and add some fields that are provided by the Managed Package – best practise here is to create a dedicated section on the page to host this information in a single page section, like this:
Whilst in the Page Layout editor, add the custom button to the page layout so it is a simple click from the Account page to get the search started (and yes, it is a very minor irritant that it says Company House rather than Companies House but I can live with this given what this app does for you):
And the final piece of config we need to do is to add a ‘Filing History’ Lightning Component to our Account Lightning page. Again, this is provided by the app so is a simple task that any admin in Lightning should be comfortable with. This provides us with a new tab like so:
And that’s it, we are done!
From here on, all we need to do is navigate to an Account record, click the button to launch the Companies House search, and confirm that we have the right company selected from the Companies House database. We then choose which fields to populate in our new page section (the method of doing so looks very much like the Merge tools when merging Accounts or Leads) and the Filing History pulls through automatically when we hit save.
It’s a really nice app that is very simple to setup and even simpler to use. And we saved the best bit until last – it’s brought to us from those lovely people at Salesforce Labs which means it’s free! Check out our video we created which will give you further detail surrounding Companies House Search.
Enjoy!