Account Hierarchy

A single account for each customer probably meets your company’s needs to track the accounts of residential customers. However, for large commercial clients, end users can build an account hierarchy. An account hierarchy is a multilevel structure reflecting parent-child relationships within the organization.

Within a complex account hierarchy, an account usually represents one of the following entities:

• A customer, prospective customer, or household

• An individual service or billing account

• An aggregate account for billing or service accounts

• A division in an organization

• An entire organization

Hierarchies can accommodate subsidiaries and complex organizations that have, for example, a world headquarters, multiple regional headquarters, and many branch locations, each with its own service and billing requirements.

This multiple-level structure supports a hierarchical view of the customer. Separate child accounts can be used to designate which information pertains to one subsidiary or another within the organization.

A hierarchy has the following further advantages:

• It allows you to maintain customer information, such as address and contact name at each point in the hierarchy.

• It aids in specifying usage and billing roll-up relationships.

• It allows you to create and maintain aggregation points and to support complex discounting methods.

To fully support mergers, demergers and corporate restructuring, Siebel Communications automatically updates the master account or parent account of an account record and its children when the changes are made to the account hierarchy. In particular, it is possible to change the parent of a child account if that subsidiary is sold to another holding company, or to change the parent of a whole organization if it is purchased by another entity. These changes take effect by changing the parent account of the account record.