Our org has a use case where we need to make a pet onboarding form for our customers, so we can collect their pet’s names, breed, weight, vaccine records, etc. I am debating using a custom object for this. Would need to ask for the First/Last Name of the contact and likely the email too if we go this route because we would need to create new custom object records for each pet submitted via the form and associate back to the contact who entered the form. Is this a good approach for “non-humans”?
Hi @Stacks42,
If contacts can have multiple pets, then a custom object for pets is absolutely the right way to go.
In your form, you can capture the contact properties (first name, last name etc) but also custom object (pet) properties – by submitting a form multiple times, a contact could “create” multiple pets, if needed.
You’re on the right path 
Best regards
Would it make sense to ask for the Contact Email? So the custom object
records can be associated back to the correct Contact Record via workflow??
@Stacks42 of course it would, yes
I am going to encounter the same problem when onboarding additional “Passengers”. We have a lead passenger form that a contact fills out and we use the email as the differentiator. Then we need to collect additional passengers and associate them back to this person via an Additional Passenger form. This could be Children, spouses, etc. We do not want to require a phone or email necessarily. I am finding it hard to leverage the contact record for this at all. Would a custom object be a solution for this case too to create multiple records like this and tie it back to the Contact Record? They would never really be leads or affilliated with Sales, Marketing or Segmentation at all.
I’m finding it hard to leverage the contact record for this case because on the Form I ask for the main contact’s email, but I cannot use the email field in the form more than once. I would probably have to do something weird where I populate data into custom contact properties and then use a workflow to create contacts on the backend but I worry that will not be fast enough to process. And I will probably run into tons of cases of duplication down the road… hard to decide what to do!
@Stacks42 maybe a step back, how exactly would you work with these additional passengers and pets? Are you just one time capturing this information or are pets and passengers continually updated, reported upon etc? Can you give more context about the use case / overall process?
We would capture this information during onboarding and our Ops/Concierge team would continually reference the information to service our customers on an ongoing basis and keep things updated. We need to be able to track information about them like relation to the lead passenger on the account, emergency contacts, gender, weight, preferred contact method, etc. The lead passenger would be a contact record because they are the account owner and we would have their email address. During the onboarding process, they would have to authorize additional people on the account. We have a few checkboxes that would be selected to designate additional permissions they would have on the account. Just need to have quick and accessible information for our operations team to view and update if someone calls in.
We also may need to keep track of some attachments, travel documents, etc. But a lot of these folks would likely be spouses, minors, or people that would not need to be a part of our sales or marketing process.
@Stacks42 it sounds like these not-relevant-for-marketing contacts could also be a custom object then, yes, if you don’t want to use the default contact object (which would mix marketing-relevant contacts and non-marketing-relevant ones).
The intake form seemed to work well when I tested it, because the Lead Passenger would enter their email address, and all of the Additional Passenger info would generate a Custom Passenger record that can be easily associated to that person/contact record (using the email as a key)
I feel like if i try to generate additional contact records on this form I will have to do a lot of workflows on the backend to make it happen, and create a lot of new properties on the contact records.
