To understand what an entity process is in Salesforce, you need to understand what an entity is first. This goes back to databases and the different elements that comprise them. We’ll try to go high level on these terms so that you won’t have to wade through a lot of technical jargon.
Defining an Entity and an Entity Process
Do you often wonder how large businesses can track hundreds if not thousands of customers? How do they manage hundreds of orders that contain a lot of information and detail from the products ordered to the shipping addresses of each customer? How do you think do they keep track of the status of each order or the details of all the transactions made by each customer?
The answer is via a database. Simply put, a database is a collection of organized information. It allows businesses to store, retrieve, update, and manage all of the business information it needs. And you also use the same tool in Salesforce.
A database has many moving elements or entities that may (or may not) interact with each other. Entities are objects that can be a person, a place a thing, organization, etc. An entity in Salesforce can be an order, a customer, an account (i.e. a company), a contact, a lead, or even an opportunity. Even the products or services that your business offers can be an entity in a database.
Simply put, an entity in Salesforce is a record that is used in a customer relationship management application.
Note that every entity in a database has attributes. Some attributes can be unique to each entity. For instance, a contact in Salesforce has unique attributes like address, first and last name, phone number etc.
Every entity in Salesforce undergoes different processes – each of them is an entity process. These processes coincide with your actual business process and with each step the information contained in each record (i.e. the entity) is changed or modified.