Customer-only hierarchy

Hi Brandon,

Totally get the concern with showing all accounts when barely a handful are relevant in the hierarchy. One way to accomplish this with existing functionality would be to create a custom hierarchy in Salesforce (by creating a custom account lookup field) that captures the right accounts to manage. You could then select this custom field in step #1 under Admin --> Account Hierarchy. It's not uncommon to have multiple hierarchies set up in Salesforce (business vs. billing, for example), and is the main reason why step #1 is configurable.

That said, we will explore providing an option to filter out non-customers, based on the broader interest in doing so. Do note that skipping accounts can make roll-ups confusing potentially, as the numbers may not add up always. Unless, all roll-ups are done only with data from non-customers.

Thanks,
Manu

First off- hierarchies look great!!! I definitely think the default hierarchy view should continue to show all accounts as I think this is important context.  That said, I think my users would appreciate the ability to filter out non-customer accounts, as needed.  We have some large, complex account families and I think hiding non-customers would make the hierarchy view a bit easier to process visually.  

Maybe there could be a checkbox they could toggle on/off that hides/shows non-customers? 

Thanks for sharing, Sara! We'll explore adding such an option to filter out non-customers as needed. Would you agree that the actual roll-ups should still take everyone into account, i.e., we should not perform roll-ups with the reduced subset of customers? Also, any other filters you see yourself/your team wanting to apply?

We are also working on making these roll-ups available for ad-hoc reporting, outside the standard hierarchy section we just released. The same logic picked above should ideally apply here.

I do agree that the roll-ups should still take all accounts (customer or non-customer) into account.  I can't think of any other filters that we'd need at the moment... maybe region?  I'll chime in if I hear of any other "nice to have" filters that come up as we roll this out to the team.

Hmm, not sure I agree with Sara. Could be confusing to have a filtered list of a few records, and then look at a roll-ed up number and see it is not the sum of the visible records. If I am filtering for Accounts in a region (great idea) then I probably want the rolled up MRR or Annual Revenue for that region only.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Why aren't there any filters for Account Hierarchy?.

I have an account that is a parent account, and it has 90 children accounts, but the vast majority of those are expired / churned. I would need a filter in Account Hierarchy where I can only keep the active children. Is this possible?

Thanks for posting, Cristina. There are two components here:

• (1) Excluding from roll-up calculations
• (2) Excluding from the hierarchy view

#1 makes sense. We might not want churned/inactive accounts to contribute to the overall ARR, for example. #2 is slightly more nuanced. If we remove churned/inactive accounts from the view completely, following would be the implications:

• (A) There would be no way to ever see what churned/inactive accounts belong to the hierarchy, since they get permanently filtered out.
• (B) The hierarchy structure gets affected when we remove an account that itself is churned/inactive, but has active customers as its children.

For #A, we could still have these accounts available in the hierarchy, removed from roll-ups of course (as an admin level filter). But give you table level filters to remove them from the view as needed. Now, because of #B, we can't hide intermediate parents that have relevant children, as that would break the structure. But if these churned/inactive accounts don't have active children under them, they would get removed from the view completely. 

Does this seem like a reasonable approach? 

A way to filter would be ideal. such as filtering only Active accounts or filtering for only accounts that have a CSM attached to the account.

I vote #1. That would work for my situation if we were able to filter the list to only show Active customers.

Thanks for sharing, Johnny. Would filtering just in the hierarchy view suffice, or would you prefer to have this affect the roll-up calculation as well?