Salesforce: Account accessibility

As we mentioned in this blog Contact, Opportunity, Case access, Role Hierarchy play a part in giving Account owner accessibility (view or edit) of Contact, Opportunity, and Case tagged to the Accounts owned by the user.

However, how is the other way round, if the Opportunity (including Contact and Case) is not the same with the Account owner, can the Opportunity owner able to access Account where the user supposed not able to access that account?

The answer is yes, this is called implicit sharing. Salesforce provides implicit sharing between accounts and child records (opportunities, cases, and contacts), and for various groups of portal users.

• Access to a parent account — If you have access to an account’s child record, you have implicit Read Only access to that account.
• Access to child records — If you have access to a parent account, you have access to the associated child records. The account owner's role determines the level of access to child records, read this blog Contact, Opportunity, Case access.

However, this does not apply to lookup relationship for custom objects.

If you are still in Classic, you can check the sharing reason, read this blog Sharing Button URL. This implicit sharing will be shown with reason as "Associated record owner or sharing", if you click that link, it will show which records that associated and give the user access to the parent record.

Click "Associated record owner or sharing" link, in this sample, I click "Allison Wheeler".

Reference:

• Contact, Opportunity, Case access
• Sharing Button URL
• Built-in Sharing Behavior
• Implicit Sharing