AccountsCopy Anchor Link

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 typesCopy Anchor Link

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.

Commercial capability — who you may open deals withCopy Anchor Link

Type says where an account stands in its relationship with you. Commercial Capability answers a different question: may we book new business against it at all?

Tender agencies, resellers-of-record, intra-group billing entities and dormant accounts are the usual Settlement Only cases: you still pay them and get paid through them, you just do not sell to them.

This is a gate, not a label. Pick an account marked Settlement Only on a new opportunity and the save is refused, with a message saying that this account is Settlement Only and telling you what to do instead. It applies to everyone, including people who cannot see the account itself — and because of that the message never names the account or repeats anything else about it; you chose it on the same form. Two things it deliberately does not do:

• It never breaks history. Opportunities that already point at the account keep working and stay editable, including after someone reclassifies the account. Only the new link is refused.
• It is not a compliance lock. It is a classification a person writes down, and the same person can set it back to Full when the relationship changes.

The two axes are independent: a Settlement Only account can be a prospect, a customer or a former customer, and winning a deal never quietly un-restricts one.

Account approvalCopy Anchor Link

A newly created account starts at Pending. It shows up in the approval inbox, and a Sales Manager approves or rejects it. Approval Status is read-only on the form, so it only ever moves through a decision on that request — nobody can type their way to Approved. A rejected account stays on file, so its details can be corrected and sent back for another look.

Approval Status answers "has this record been signed off?". Active answers "is this account live at all?". They are deliberately separate: an approved account can later be deactivated, and a pending account is not the same thing as an inactive one.

If your organisation does not want to sign accounts off, an admin changes the default on Approval Status to Approved and no new account enters the queue again — see Administration › Automation.

What each account record storesCopy Anchor Link

The account detail screen is organised into 7 sections:

Two of those need a word of explanation.

Registration Number is the counterparty's registered identity as issued by its own government registry — whichever registry that is. It is deliberately not named after any one country's scheme, because the right answer differs by where the company is registered, and the field has to hold all of them. It is what invoicing, credit checks and matching duplicate companies key on, and it is searchable, so you can find an account by it from global search and from any account picker. It is not the Account Number, which is the sequence we issue and which already appears in the record title.

Business Profile is sales intelligence about how this account buys: who currently holds it (Incumbent Vendor), how much it plans to spend with suppliers this year (Annual Purchasing Budget), and how it pays (Payment Cycle). None of that is the same as Annual Revenue, which is what the account earns — the budget is what it will spend.

Account hierarchyCopy Anchor Link

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 rulesCopy Anchor Link

• 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 still has opportunities — closed ones included — or active contracts. A closed deal is part of the account's sales history, so closing a deal does not free the account: the delete goes through only once every deal is deleted or, while it is still open, moved to another account. To retire the account, set it to Inactive instead (is_active = false).
• You cannot open a new opportunity against an account whose Commercial Capability is Settlement Only. The opportunities it already has are untouched and stay editable.

Automatic updatesCopy Anchor Link

• 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 layoutCopy Anchor Link

When you open an account, these tabs sit under the header:

• Details — the account's fields, in the sections described above.
• Related — one list for each kind of record linked to the account, such as its contacts, opportunities and contracts. Each list shows how many records it holds and has a New button.
• Approvals — the account's approval requests and how each one was decided. This tab appears only on an account that has been through approval.
• Attachments — files uploaded to the account.

The Discussion feed sits below the tabs and stays in view whichever tab is open.

Sharing — who can see which accountCopy Anchor Link

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 whatCopy Anchor Link

• 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 viewsCopy Anchor Link

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 emptyCopy Anchor Link

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 repsCopy Anchor Link

• ✅ 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 adminsCopy Anchor Link

• 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.