Onboarding
Part of Customer success tools
Checking account hierarchy support
Test whether a success platform assigns contacts, health, tasks and commercial records to the right parent and child accounts.
Check account hierarchy support against how your team owns work and reports results. A parent–child diagram is only a starting point. The platform must also place the right contact, health input, task and commercial record at the right level. Build a small example of the structure you need and trace those records through it.
Define the entities before mapping them
Identify the legal customer, operating unit, product workspace and contract or subscription in your source systems. They may not form one neat tree. Decide which level has the success owner, which has the person performing the task and which holds a commercial decision. Record a stable source identifier for each entity.
For example, a head office may set a goal while two regional teams have separate users and support cases. The group might hold one contract or each region might hold its own. Establish that from the source records; do not infer it from the organisational chart.
Steps to validate account hierarchy configuration
- Identify legal customer, operating unit, product workspace and contractUse stable source identifiers; avoid assumptions from organisational charts.
- Assign success owner, task performer and commercial decision-makerClarify role at each level based on source records.
- Determine what rolls up: stays at child, appears at parent, or is calculatedEnsure contact, health, tasks and contracts are assigned correctly.
- Validate roll-up logic in reports, alerts and account pagesCheck that scores and summaries reflect accurate data distribution.
Specify what rolls up
For each field, decide whether it stays at the child level, appears at the parent level or is calculated across children. A parent view may need each child's status rather than one blended value. A sum of recurring contract value is useful only when the same contract is not counted twice. Product use, service cases and commitments should remain traceable to where they occurred.
| Record | Question to check |
|---|---|
| Contact or owner | Does this person belong to the group, a unit or both? |
| Product event | Which identifier receives it, and can a group view explain any roll-up? |
| Service issue | Can the group owner see it without making every child appear affected? |
| Task | Is its owner and due date attached to the correct entity? |
| Contract value | Is a displayed total derived from distinct contract records? |
Check the same answers in account pages, reports and alerts. A correct-looking tree may still supply the wrong population to a score.
Compare the documented models
Gainsight NXT documents a Company Hierarchy section showing parents, children and siblings. Administrators can configure roll-ups for eligible number, currency and percentage fields; its setup uses the parent's Gainsight ID to establish the relationship. Ask how source identifiers become the correct Company records and which fields can be aggregated in the proposed configuration.
Planhat documents multi-level parent–child Company structures and calculates and displays the average Health Score across the group. Its Salesforce integration can map a Salesforce Parent Account ID, or another field containing the parent's Salesforce ID, to Planhat's Parent Org field.
If that mapping is added after integration setup, the documentation instructs administrators to save it and fetch the Company/Account data again. Check both the parent mapping and the child evidence behind any combined health view.
Vitally documents an Organization above Accounts. Many objects can roll up from the Account to the Organization level, while objects only at the Organization level cannot roll down to the Account level.
Confirm where tasks, health and contract records would live in the proposed setup.
Platform support for account hierarchy and roll-up features
- Gainsight NXTConfigurable Company Hierarchy with parent-child relationships using Gainsight ID; supports roll-ups for number, currency and percentage fields.
- PlanhatMulti-level parent–child structures; calculates average Health Score across group; syncs via Salesforce Parent Account ID or custom field mapping.
- VitallyOrganization object above Accounts; supports roll-up of multiple objects from Account to Organization level; no down-rolling to Account level.
Run an acceptance case
Use permitted records for a parent, two children and a standalone account. Map them through the proposed connector. Check for duplicate parents, child ownership, a problem confined to one child and a parent summary that preserves that distinction.
Change one child's parent in the source and inspect the destination relationship and any history the team needs. Record a workaround and its maintenance owner if a required relationship cannot be represented.
Accept hierarchy support for the cases the trial demonstrates. Keep unanswered roll-up, permissions and contract questions as conditions for the purchase decision.
