Creating records in Salesforce CRM is quick and easy. Users often need to create account records in a timely manner in order to start the process of doing business with the company or organization.

Often in organizations, there is a standard procedure that requires users to search for the account manually before they create the new record, and the search facility in Salesforce CRM is extremely good for finding records.

Having a manual procedure, however, is not always adequate, and users may be tempted simply to create a record, which can generate duplicate record entries and result in poor data quality and difficulties managing information later in the business process.

In this chapter, we provide recipes for building custom functionality, and create a solution that extends the standard Salesforce account creation mechanism with a "Search First Before You Create" feature that makes it necessary for users to search for accounts first before entering them into the system.