Changing record types for accounts

Question

Our org uses person accounts and I'm trying to change the record types of a bunch of account records to be person accounts from organizations.

However, I can't find a way of successfully changing the record types all at once. I've tried the download/upload approach in the data loader as well as the code below. Both give error messages...

id persType = '012d0000000OQJ0AAO';
list <account> impacted = [select Id, Name, ownerid, RecordTypeId, IsPersonAccount from account 
                          where IsPersonAccount = false];
for (account r : impacted) {
    r.RecordTypeid = persType;
}
upsert impacted;

If you've done this successfully in the past, please share your tricks...

Thanks,

Steve

Answer 1

you cannot change a person account record type to one designated for business accounts. You can change an account's record type only to another record type of the same kind. Reference

Answer 2

See How to convert a standard Account and Contact to a Person Account?