In salesforce, lead is converted into Account, Contact, and Opportunity. Opportunity is optional to create upon conversion.
The convert button on Lead does the conversion. Is it possible to convert the lead through standard automation like process builder or flow?
Thank you!
Workflows, Validation Rules and Before triggers fire on Lead Conversion only if the Setup > Customise > Leads > Settings > Enable validations and triggers is checked.
It might be worth checking if this setting is enabled, because otherwise the Lead Status value will not be synced to your custom field on Lead Conversion via workflow, and therefore not be copied across.
(Even then, I believe the Lead Triggers / Workflows fire after the Account and Contact ones, so it may be to late for the Lead Status to copy across)
The order of execution at Lead Conversion has been answered here
This can be achieved by a trivial LeadAfter trigger, or if the Lead Status is always set to Qualified upon Conversion, then you could set 'Qualified' as the Default Value on the Contact Lead Status field.
(One way of doing it also may be to only allow 'Qualified' Leads to be Converted - this can be controlled by having a different layout for Qualified Leads, when the status changes to Qualified, a workflow fires - changes RecordType to QualifiedLead and therefore associated Page Layout changes, which now has the Convert Button. With this approach, the Lead Status at conversion is available in advance and available to be copied across at Lead Conversion)
Take a look at the documentation:
There you have the ability to provide an existing AccountId and ContactId with the methods setAccountId() and setContactId(), respectively.
You just have to make sure that your contact is associated with the account you provide in AccountId, and if you use PersonAccounts, don't provide the ContactId
setAccountId Sets the ID of the account into which the lead will be merged. This value is required only when updating an existing account, including person accounts. Otherwise, if setAccountID is specified, a new account is created.
setContactId Sets the ID of the contact into which the lead will be merged (this contact must be associated with the account specified with setAccountId, and setAccountId must be specified). This value is required only when updating an existing contact.Important If you are converting a lead into a person account, do not specify setContactId or an error will result. Specify only setAccountId of the person account. If setContactID is specified, then the application creates a new contact that is implicitly associated with the account.
Best Answer
So, yes you can do this in Flow (or Process Builder) but you will need to invoke an Apex invocable class to do the actual lead conversion using the Database.convertLead method
The Salesforce Automation Champion blog post describes this in detail. UnofficialSF.com (managed by the Flow Product Manager) has very specific details on what the invocable method should look like.