Accounts

An account is a company (or any organisation) you do business with. It's the central hub everything else hangs off:

• Contacts work for an account.
• Opportunities are with an account.
• Cases are raised by an account.
• Quotes and contracts are signed by an account.

The 4 account types

Every account has a type that drives how the rest of the system treats it:

When a contract is activated for a prospect, the system automatically promotes the account to Customer. You don't have to remember to update it.

What each account record stores

The account detail screen is organised into 6 sections:

Account hierarchy

Use Parent Account to model global companies with subsidiaries:

Acme Corp Global
├── Acme Corp US
├── Acme Corp EMEA
│   ├── Acme Corp UK
│   └── Acme Corp Germany
└── Acme Corp APAC

The hierarchy gives you:

• Rolled-up revenue — Child Account Revenue, on the Financials section, is the sum of the Annual Revenue of this account's direct children. The platform maintains it: it moves when a child's revenue is edited, when a child is re-parented onto another account, and when a child is deleted. It is one level deep, so a grandparent shows the total of its own children rather than of the whole tree.
• Easier navigation — from a child you can jump to the global parent.

Two things the hierarchy deliberately does not do. It does not cascade sharing: accounts are private, and granting someone the parent gives them nothing on the children — use the sharing rules on Administration › Sharing for that. And it does not roll anything else up: opportunities, cases and contacts belong to the account they name, and no report sums them up the tree.

Built-in rules

• The account name must be unique within your organization. You'll get an error if you try to create a second account with a name you already use. Another organization on the same platform is free to have its own "Acme Corp" — the rule is scoped to your data, not the whole platform. The uniqueness check compares names exactly as typed, so Acme Corp and ACME Corp can both exist as separate accounts. Lead conversion is more forgiving: it ignores capitalisation and extra spaces when looking for an account to reuse (see Leads), so converting a lead for ACME Corp attaches it to your existing Acme Corp rather than creating a near-duplicate.
• Annual revenue must be zero or positive — no negative numbers allowed.
• You cannot delete an account that has open opportunities or active contracts. Set it to Inactive instead (is_active = false).

Automatic updates

• Last Activity Date is auto-stamped whenever the account changes owner or type, so you can always tell when there was last meaningful movement.
• The Type flips to Customer on the first contract activation — but no date comes with it. There is no Customer Since field, and no field of any name records when the account became a customer, so a cohort question ("which accounts did we win last quarter?") has to be answered from the contract's Signed Date or Start Date.
• The Total Opportunity Amount and Won Opportunity Amount roll up automatically from related opportunities.
• The Open Case Count is always live, so you can see at a glance if a customer is having a rough time.

Account detail layout

When you open an account, you'll see tabs for:

• Overview — description, key contacts, owner, primary address with a small map.
• Opportunities — all related deals, grouped by stage, with the pipeline total at the top.
• Contacts — everyone at this account, with the primary contact highlighted.
• Cases — open and recently closed support cases.
• Activity — calls, emails, meetings, latest first.
• Contracts — active and historical contracts.
• Files — attached documents (logos, signed PDFs, datasheets).

Sharing — who can see which account

By default accounts are private — only the owner. Positions are flat and nothing rolls up, so no one sees an account by sitting above its owner in an org chart; every other reader is named by one of the rules below.

On top of that:

• Active customer accounts are shared automatically with all Sales Managers (read/edit).
• Territory rules share accounts by Territory:
  • na → North America sales team
  • emea → Europe sales team
  • other → no territory team

Territory is a read-only picklist on the account, derived from the country you enter in Billing Address. You never set it directly — correct the address and the territory follows.

Case and surrounding spaces do not matter — de, DE and de are the same country. Anything this table does not list is Other: a stated value rather than a blank, so an account no territory covers shows up as such instead of quietly missing from every list. Territory and Billing Country (the country exactly as it was typed) both sit in the Locations section of the account, which makes them the first thing to check when a territory team says an account is missing from their list.

Admins can change these rules — see Administration › Sharing.

Who can edit what

• Annual revenue is read-only for Sales Reps. Only Sales Managers and above can change it (protects financial estimates).
• Description is editable by everyone with access to the account.

Standard list views

Accounts opens on All Accounts, and the switcher along the top of the list carries six saved views — these, and nothing else:

Why the customer-success queue can be empty

At-Risk Accounts reads the fields on the Customer Success section of the account form (Tier, Segment, Health Score), and is scoped to Type = Customer before anything else:

• A prospect or a partner never appears, however those fields are filled in. Promote the account to Customer first — activating a contract does that for you.
• Health Score is maintained by hand by whoever owns the relationship and has no default value. On an org where nobody sets it, At-Risk Accounts is empty — that is missing data, not a broken filter.

Tips for sales reps

• ✅ Always set a primary contact — many flows default to it (quotes, contracts).
• ✅ Use Parent Account rather than creating duplicate accounts per region.
• ✅ Promote prospect → customer the moment a contract is signed (this happens automatically, but verify).

Tips for admins

• Adding a new industry or country territory? See Administration › Sharing and Customization › Extending Objects.
• The 6 default sections on the detail screen can be reordered or hidden per profile.