Siebel Communications Guide - Downloads - Oracle

Accounts in Siebel Communications ■ About Accounts in Siebel Communications
■ An individual service or billing account
■ An aggregate account for billing or service accounts
■ A division in an organization
■ An entire organization
Hierarchies can accommodate subsidiaries and complex organizations that have, for example, a
world headquarters, multiple regional headquarters, and many branch locations, each with its own
service and billing requirements.
This multiple-level structure supports a top-down view of the customer. Separate child accounts can
be used to designate which information pertains to one subsidiary or another within the organization.
A hierarchy has these further advantages:
■ It allows you to maintain customer information, such as address and contact name at each point
in the hierarchy.
■ It aids in specifying usage and billing roll-up relationships.
■ It allows you to create and maintain aggregation points and to support complex discounting
methods.
To fully support mergers, demergers and corporate restructuring, Siebel Communications
automatically updates the master account or parent account of an account record and its children
when the changes are made to the account hierarchy. In particular, it is possible to reparent a child
account if that subsidiary is sold to another holding company, or to reparent a whole organization if
it is purchased by another entity. These changes take effect by changing the parent account of the
account record.
Account Classes
An account class is a method for classifying an account according to its position and role in an
account hierarchy. When setting up the hierarchy, end users define parent-child relationships among
the accounts. Then they designate which account class applies to each new account, according to
your customer’s requirements and organizational structure.
For example, with communications companies, it is common for the service to be delivered to one
subsidiary while bills get sent to another subsidiary. Separate accounts would be created for each
subsidiary, one with the account class service and the other with the account class billing to reflect
their different functions. An account given the account class service generally stores service item
information and allows end users to analyze the customer’s usage or orders. An account given the
account class billing generally stores information for the financial transaction or invoice.
Siebel Communications does not restrict parent-child associations based on account class. Any class
can be a child of any other class. For example, a customer account can be placed anywhere in the
hierarchy, and a billing account can be the parent or the child of a service account. To enforce
hierarchy rules based on account class, you need to set them up through state models. For more
information about state models, see Siebel Business Process Framework: Workflow Guide.
Out of the box, Siebel Communications provides these five classes for accounts:
44
Siebel Communications Guide Version 8.1 Rev. D