Customer Account Hierarchy
EarnBill Customer Account Hierarchy feature enables you to classify customers into various account types and organize them using a parent-child relationship. The classification of customers could be based on specific criteria like line of business, location, division/branches, etc. — meaning how you want your customers to be categorized in the system for efficient billing management. Further, there is no restriction on the customer accounts and their sub-account creation, meaning you can create as many as you want with hierarchy supported up to the nth level
The customer account hierarchy comprises two essential functionalities:
1) Account Types
Customer Account Types are templates for groups of customers that require the same or similar details. In other words, it facilitates the grouping of customers who have some common attribute and enables you to establish customized account types. For example, divisions inside your company or clientele groups such as VIP, B2B, and B2C customers – depicted in the diagram below.
Further, EarnBill also allows you to create user-defined sections (account information types) to capture additional information. For instance, an account type for business customers might include data fields such as company name. In contrast, an account type for residential customers might include data fields such as employer name.
2) Customer Account and Sub Accounts
EarnBill supports multiple-level customer management through its sub-accounts feature. Any customer account can be a parent account with one or more sub-accounts (child accounts). A sub-account (child account) can also be a parent with its sub-accounts. It is also possible to set up invoicing with parent-only pricing for every child account.
For instance, your customer is a business-to-business (B2B) entity with several branches or locations. Although the parent customer (head office) demands a single invoice that includes all locations, each location (the client’s sub-accounts) is independently subscribed to your services. The usability is explained further in the business use cases below.
Business Use Cases
With the help of EarnBill’s customer account hierarchy, businesses can organize their customers using a parent-child relationship where the child account acts as the end user of your services, and the parent account is the one who gets (and pays) the invoice. There is a good chance of using sub-accounts, especially when the customer using your services is not the same as the customer paying for them.
Many real-world scenarios may seem to be very different from each other at first, but they always retain a similar account structure. Let’s examine a few common usage cases:
- A large account with multiple locations
- An organization with many users
- A Family
Suppose your customer is a company that has multiple locations or branches. At some places, each employee is responsible for their invoices. At other locations, the branch office might pay for the services. At some locations and for some employees, the head office pays the invoices.
A typical client could be a company with many employees. A few of these employees will get company-paid cell phones. Every month (per billing period), this company receives a single invoice that includes all the charges associated with each of its employees. Thus, the company will be represented as a parent account and each employee as a child account.
Suppose a family serves as the customer, where multiple people may use the same (or different) products and services at the same or separate locations, but all accounts are combined into a single invoice.
Advantages
Additionally, EarnBill’s sophisticated solution offers configurable functionality to accommodate your requirements.
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- Preference to invoice a parent or a child customer and notify accordingly based on customer choices.
- Flexibility to define custom fields to capture any specific information at different levels like account type, customer account, and sub-accounts.
- Ability to override specific parameters/settings at the customer account level plus configure the languages, currencies, credit limit, notifications, payment method, billing cycle, and invoice template at the account type level.
- Option to apply parent pricing and use customer-specific pricing with easy customization per your requirements.