When a contact does not have an account assigned, it is not visible to users, even if there is a contact sharing rule active that shares the contact to their role. As as admin, I have looked at the sharing of the object and their role is included. The org-wide default for contact sharing is set to private.
From salesforce documentation:
In addition, if a Contact is not linked to an Account, it will be
private – irrespective of org-wide defaults.
I need to enforce contact sharing rules based on role, which the contact sharing rules do, how do I handle these contacts without accounts?
UPDATE:
Spent a few hours screen sharing and demonstrating the issue to Salesforce support and they cannot confirm whether this is intended functionality or a bug.
We attempted:
- Sharing by criteria to role
- Sharing by contact owner role to role
- Sharing by contact owner role to group
- Sharing by criteria to group
All of which still resulted in insufficient privileges to users within that role for contacts with accounts, even though the sharing rule and record sharing screen indicated this contact was being shared to that role.
Best Answer
Salesforce R&D has confirmed that this is intended functionality.
They agree the documentation here isn't very clear so they have updated the knowledge article to include:
Help Article: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=000004005&language=en_US&type=1
Success Idea: https://ideas.salesforce.com/s/idea/a0B8W00000Gde90UAB/contacts-without-accounts-ability-to-make-them-not-private