What is the account and contact schema when contact address is linked to the account address?

[scottdurow]

It is common for contact addresses to be marked as being the same as the account address. What is the schema for this so that logic can be provided to automatically update the contact address when the account address changes.

[crm-cat]

Would there be a 'Master' - and a one way synchronization of data, or if the Contact changes it would update the Account and if the Account changes it would update the Contact?

I suppose if you think about it this is similar when we shop online, and Billing Addresses are the same for the Delivery addresses, and we simply check a box to say that. I wonder if similar logic might be useful here, so say for example, rather than updating the address at all for the Contact (or having it visible), could a checkbox be used to say 'This is the same as the Account' which provides the above logic?

[cseymr]

I'm just working on this in a project at the moment, in which there is a requirement to have 'Addresses' as a thing, and they need to be associated with entities other than just Contacts and Accounts. So, as I'm now forced to deal with an custom Address entity (which we'll call Location), I've doubled down and settled on getting the user to set the Contact's Business address by picking from any Location set on the Account, and then mirroring it in the linked Address fields/entity.

But it's a bit smoke and mirrors, so a proper solution in which Addresses could be shared would be nice :-)