Overview of Zone Types and Zones

Geography hierarchy is a data model that creates conceptual parent-child relationships between geographies.

Geography hierarchies can be classified as follows:

• Master Reference Geography Hierarchy: This refers to the predefined geography hierarchy and is considered as the source of truth. It is defined by widely recognized administrative or political boundaries such as States, Provinces, Counties, Cities, and so on. This hierarchy can be obtained from a supplier or manually entered. This geography hierarchy is the source when validating addresses or importing data. Examples are the State of California, the Province of Alberta, The Country of India, and so on.

• User Defined Geography Hierarchy: This refers to geography hierarchy defined by the user. This geography hierarchy may be created using the Master Reference Geography, obtained from a supplier, or entered manually. A user-defined geography hierarchy can have:

  • Zone Types

  • Zones

Zone Types

Zone types categorize and group zones together, for example, the zone types of Income Tax and Shipping Regions.

Zone types need to be created before you define a zone for the geographical boundary. You can create a zone type which will contain geographical boundaries from anywhere in the world, or you can create a zone type that will only contain geographies from within a specified country. When you create a zone type that's bounded by a country you can define which geography types or geographies you will be able to choose when you create a zone.

Zones

Zones are geographical boundaries for a zone type, for example, the San Jose Tax zone. Zones are based on the master reference geography hierarchy data.

Zones are created within a zone type, and you can associate geographies to define the zone. For example, for the Shipping Regions zone type you can create a West Coast zone which has the state of California as one of its geographies. Within a geography you can specify a postal range. So, for the state of California, for example, you can specify that the zone spans from postal code 90001 to 90011.

Zones Created in Master Geographies

Here is the list of zones created using master geographies in each product offering and the tasks to load them:

Product Offering	Task Name
Territory Geographies	Manage Territory Geographies
Tax	Manage Tax Zone Types
Shipping	Manage Shipping Zones
Compensation	Compensation Zones

Note: There are no bulk loaders for loading these zones.

For more information about creating zone types and zones, see the Related Topics section.