Retrieving all accounts linked to a specific contact in Zoho Desk can be done either through the UI or programmatically via the REST API — this article covers both approaches.
Why this matters
Contacts in Zoho Desk can be associated with more than one account — for example, a consultant working across several businesses or a contact representing multiple companies. [4] Knowing which accounts a contact belongs to helps support agents route tickets correctly, maintain accurate customer records, and avoid duplicate or misattributed support history. [8] If you are building an integration or automation, the API approach lets you retrieve this data programmatically without manual lookups.
> Note: Beam Help is independent expert support for Zoho — we are not official Zoho support.
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Step-by-step
Option A — Using the Zoho Desk API
Step 1. Identify the contact_id of the contact whose accounts you want to retrieve. This is the unique identifier Zoho Desk assigns to each contact record. You can find it in the contact's detail page URL or by querying the contacts endpoint. [3]
Step 2. Send a GET request to the following Zoho Desk API endpoint, substituting your actual contact ID into the path: [3]
GET /api/v1/contacts/{contact_id}/accountsStep 3. Optionally pass a p parameter in the query string to control pagination if the contact is linked to many accounts. The operation name for this call is listaccountsof_contact. [3]
Step 4. In Python, the call looks like this — pass the contact_id as a string and an optional dictionary for any query parameters: [3]
def list_accounts_of_contact(self, contact_id: str, p: dict = None):
return self.c.request("GET", f"/api/v1/contacts/{contact_id}/accounts", p, None)Step 5. Parse the response payload. Each item in the returned list represents an account associated with that contact, including account details such as name and ID. [3]
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Option B — Looking up from the account side
If you already know the account and want to confirm which contacts belong to it (the reverse lookup), use the associated contacts endpoint instead: [2]
GET /api/v1/accounts/{account_id}/contactsThis is the listassociatedcontacts operation and accepts account_id and an optional p pagination parameter. [2]
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Option C — Using the Zoho Desk UI
Step 1. Navigate to the Customers tab in your Zoho Desk portal. Both Contacts and Accounts are accessible from this section. [8]
Step 2. Open the contact's detail page by clicking on the contact's name in the list view. [8]
Step 3. On the contact detail page, look for the associated accounts section. Because Zoho Desk supports multi-account association for contacts, this section will display all accounts the contact is currently linked to. [4]
Step 4. To associate an additional account with a contact via the API, use a POST request to the same base path: [5]
POST /api/v1/contacts/{contact_id}/accountsPass the account details in the request body (data dictionary). This is the createassociateaccountswithcontact operation. [5]
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Common pitfalls
- Single vs. multiple account support: By default, a contact in Zoho Desk belongs to only one account. [4] Multi-account association is a feature that must be enabled — if the
GET /api/v1/contacts/{contact_id}/accountsendpoint returns only one result, verify whether the multi-account feature has been turned on in your portal settings. [4] - Confusing the two lookup directions: There are two distinct endpoints — one retrieves accounts for a given contact (
/contacts/{contactid}/accounts) and the other retrieves contacts for a given account (/accounts/{accountid}/contacts). [2][3] Using the wrong one will return an empty or unexpected result set. - Pagination: If a contact is linked to a large number of accounts, results may be paginated. Always handle the
pparameter in your API calls to ensure you retrieve the full list. [3]
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What to check
- Confirm that the
contact_idyou are using is valid and exists in your Zoho Desk portal before making the API call. [3] - Verify that multi-account association is enabled in your Desk settings if you expect more than one account to be returned per contact. [4]
- Ensure your API credentials have the necessary permissions to read contact and account records under the Customers module. [8]