Account Hierarchies
An account hierarchy provides salespeople a visual representation of relationships between accounts. You can use an account hierarchy to represent the structure of accounts in large customers and organizations with multiple layers. The hierarchy need not mirror the formal corporate structure, but can instead represent your organization's view of your customers. Each account in the hierarchy can have only one parent account.
Capturing account hierarchies can benefit the sales organization in a number of ways:
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Salespeople can use the hierarchy to see the position of their account in the hierarchy.
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You can create BI Publisher reports to show revenue for the hierarchy as a whole.
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You can use the hierarchy to provide key account directors and other select managers access to accounts and opportunities in the hierarchy that they can't access otherwise.
Accounts for a large multinational corporation, for example, are typically assigned to sales teams in different countries or regions. Because managers in each region can only access information in their own region, no single manager can access all of the accounts and opportunities for the entire multinational. By including an account in the territory of a manager, you can provide that manager with edit access to all accounts and opportunities in the hierarchy below that account. If you include the top account in the territory, the manager gets edit access to all accounts. If you include an account in the middle of the hierarchy, the manager can access only those accounts in that particular branch.
You can create and maintain the account hierarchy in the UI, by clicking the Manage Account Hierarchy link in the Edit Account page, Overview tab.
You can also build the hierarchy by entering the parent of an account on the Edit Account, Profile tab. Here's a screenshot of the portion of the tab, highlighting the Parent Account field.
Alternatively, you can import the hierarchy as described in this chapter.