Irregular Territory Hierarchies Where Territories Don't Roll Up to the Same Parent

Normally, the coverage values in the child territories roll up to the parent. For example, the territory selling laptops in Hawaii and the territory selling servers in Hawaii both roll up to the territory selling products in the western US.

But what if the VP of US sales decides to take over the Hawaii servers territory for herself so she can play golf? Now the two Hawaii territories roll up to different levels in the territory hierarchy. You could end up with wrong assignments and duplicate forecasts. This topic explains how you can assure proper assignment and forecasting by creating parent territories with no coverage. A parent territory with no coverage still gets the forecasts from the children territories, but it's skipped over for assignment. Creating sales territories with no coverage effectively separates assignment and forecasting. Here are two scenarios to illustrate the difference between a regular hierarchy and an irregular one.

Regular Address Hierarchy

Here's a diagram illustrating the structure of a simple regular address hierarchy. The Western US territory includes territories for the western states and the Eastern US territory includes all the territories for the eastern states. The Western US territory is the parent of both Hawaii Servers and Hawaii Laptops.

Diagram showing a simple territory hierarchy with the US Sales territory at the top. Western US and Eastern US are child territories of US Sales. Hawaii Servers and Hawaii Laptops are child territories of Western US.

Here are the entries for the territories in the diagram.

Territory Name	Territory Type	Address	Product
US Sales	Prime	Any	Any
Eastern US	Prime	States in the eastern US.	Any
Western US	Prime	States in the western US.	Any
Hawaii Servers	Prime	Hawaii	Servers
Hawaii Laptops	Prime	Hawaii	Laptops

Here's how the application assigns accounts and opportunities using this territory setup:

An account in Hawaii is automatically assigned to both the Hawaii Servers and Hawaii Laptops territories.
An opportunity for a server in a Hawaii account is assigned to the Hawaii Servers territory. An opportunity for a laptop goes to the Hawaii Laptops territory.
An opportunity for a service product in Hawaii is assigned to the Western US.

Irregular Address Hierarchy

Now imagine that the Vice President for US Sales likes to play golf in Hawaii, so she decides to handle one of the Hawaii territories herself. The resulting territory structure splits Hawaii across two different hierarchy levels. The Hawaii Servers territory is now a child of US Sales, while the Hawaii Laptops territory remains under Western US. The following figure reflects the change.

Diagram showing a simple irregular territory hierarchy with the US Sales territory at the top. Western US, Eastern US, and Hawaii Servers are child territories of US Sales. Hawaii Laptops is the child of the Western US territory

If you keep the territory settings the same and the same opportunity comes in for servers in the Hawaii account, the application assigns both the Western US and Hawaii Severs territories.

Here's how the application arrives at the assignment:

The application first checks for all possible matching territories. These are Western US, Hawaii Servers, and US Sales
The application discards all the ancestors of the matching territories: US Sales is a parent of Western US so gets discarded.

Because the opportunity is assigned to two territories in the hierarchy, it could end up in both territory forecasts and being counted twice in revenue projections. You can fix the assignment issues in this example by creating the Western US territory with blank coverage. Having blank coverage (no coverage in all the territory dimensions) means that the territory gets skipped for assignment, but still allows for forecasting to roll up as before. Here are the revised entries:

Territory Name	Territory Type	Address	Product
US Sales	Prime	Any	Any
Eastern US	Prime	States in the eastern US.	Any
Hawaii Servers	Prime	Hawaii	Servers
Western US	Prime	Blank	Blank
Hawaii Laptops	Prime	Hawaii	Laptops

The application now assigns only the Hawaii Servers territory. Here's how the application arrived at the assignment:

The application first checks for all possible matching territories. These are Hawaii Servers, and US Sales.
The application discards all the ancestors of the matching territories: US Sales is a parent of Hawaii Servers and so gets discarded.