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Maintaining Business Hierarchies

Overview

Using Admin, you can define hierarchies for relationships between customers. Defining hierarchies enables credit analysts to view consolidated exposure and aging for the customer's entire hierarchy, or for a subset of the hierarchy, and to allocate credit lines for an account in the hierarchy to any account below it.

To view this hierarchy data, credit analysts use the Business Hierarchy feature of the Customer Analysis module. To allocate credit lines they use the Credit Lines feature of the Customer Analysis module.

Hierarchies are classified by type. The standard types provided with eCredit are business and legal. Using the Maintain Lists and Items feature, you can add any custom hierarchy types required by your workflow.

The standard hierarchies provided with eCredit have names assigned to each level. You are able to change the level names using the Admin module's List and Items feature. If you add custom hierarchy types, the custom types do not have level names.

By default, business hierarchies use the following level names:

Level	Level Name
Root customer	Ultimate
One level below the root	Parent
Two levels below the root	Subsidiary

By default, legal hierarchies use the following level names:

Level	Level Name
Root customer	Ultimate
One level below the root	Headquarters
Two levels below the root	Branch
Three levels below the root	Invoice To

For each customer in the hierarchy, the hierarchy tree displays the customer number, DUNS number, the business entity level, the legal entity level, the region, and the total accounts receivable if this information is maintained for the customer. The customer name is a link to the customer record, enabling you to access information stored in eCredit for any customer you add to the hierarchy.

The Business Hierarchy feature works in the following way to ensure that hierarchies remain accurate, to facilitate updating hierarchies, and to allow you to flexibly define them:

A customer can appear only once in each type of hierarchy.
A hierarchy can have only one root (top level) customer, but subsequent levels can have more than one customer at the same level.
You can add an unlimited number of levels to the hierarchy.
You can split an existing hierarchy into two hierarchies.
When you add a customer to a hierarchy, and that customer is the root for an existing hierarchy of the same type, you can add the entire hierarchy to the new hierarchy you are creating. When you opt to add the entire hierarchy, you are warned that this automatically deletes the existing hierarchy.
When you delete a customer from a hierarchy, you automatically delete all customers under the customer you select to delete.
The Admin Business Hierarchies feature includes a search capability that enables you to verify that a hierarchy does not already exist before creating a new hierarchy. The Business Hierarchy search feature also enables you to quickly locate hierarchies for editing or viewing.
If any account in a hierarchy has a credit line allocation, you are not able to delete the hierarchy.
When deleting a customer account from a hierarchy, if the customer has a credit allocation, you are not able to delete the customer from the hierarchy.
When adding a customer to a hierarchy, if the customer or any account below it in the hierarchy has an allocated credit line, you are not able to add the customer to the hierarchy.