What are account hierarchies?

Account hierarchies are a structural representation of relationships between accounts. You can use an account hierarchy to represent the structure of accounts of large customers and organizations with multiple layers.

Note these points about account hierarchies:

• In Sales, an account hierarchy doesn't need to match the formal corporate structure of the customer. Instead, it can represent your organization's view of the customer.
• Each account in the hierarchy can have only one parent account.
• Salespeople can use the hierarchy to see the position of a single or multiple accounts in the hierarchy.
• You can use the hierarchy to give specific account directors and other select managers access to accounts and opportunities in the hierarchy that they wouldn't be able to 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 corporation.

  By including an account in the territory of a manager, you can give that manager 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 BI Publisher reports to show revenue for the hierarchy as a whole.

Here's a screenshot of the hierarchy of the fictitious Pinnacle Technologies company and its subsidiaries (classic Sales).

In classic Sales, 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 the related topics.