Client Groups & Account Hierarchy¶

Part of: ClientVerse Core (every client).

What it is¶

Two separate answers to "this one client is actually several Account records", which sound alike and are not.

Account hierarchy is about the same commercial entity appearing many times. Practice management systems create duplicates as a matter of routine — an inactive client record gets replaced rather than reopened, so one company can arrive as anywhere from ten to seventy-five records. The hierarchy collapses that into a coherent structure.

Client Groups are about different entities the firm chooses to treat as one client — a corporate family, a billing group, a relationship portfolio, or something entirely arbitrary. The grouping is the firm's own view, not the outside world's.

The distinction matters because the two are sourced differently: the hierarchy is derived automatically from incoming data, and a Client Group is a deliberate, curated decision.

Who it's for¶

BD and relationship managers read both — they are what makes "how much do we do for this client?" answerable. Admins own the configuration and watch the hierarchy resolution.

How account hierarchy works¶

Three tiers:

Tier	What it is
Brand Account	The canonical commercial name. No parent.
Child Account	A genuinely distinct entity under the brand.
Related Company (`Related_Company__c`)	A collapsed duplicate — the same entity arriving again from the PMS.

Resolution runs at load time and again on every PMS sync, driven by name normalisation and domain matching only. Two records collapse into one when the normalised names match and the root domains are not known to differ. They stay separate when the domains are known to differ.

The PMS parent_client_id field is deliberately not used. It is unreliable across firms — some populate it with real organisational structure, others with an arbitrary active client. A hierarchy built on it would be right at some firms and quietly wrong at others.

The batch's Child Account assignment is a first pass, not an answer. Real organisational relationships are confirmed and maintained by business users in Salesforce. Treat the automated result as a starting point that a human corrects, and expect to correct some.

How Client Groups work¶

A Client Group (Client_Group__c) is a first-class object, not an Account record type. Each Account points at one through Account.Client_Group__c.

The group carries its own name and number, the state and country of its principal location, the relationship partner who owns it firm-wide, and its industry and geography classifications. Member totals — client count, active client count, the member list — are computed by the rollups engine off that lookup.

A Client Group is not a client. It has no client number, no client status, and never bills. That is precisely why it is not an Account record type: Account.ParentId is already committed to the corporate hierarchy above, which is sourced externally. Modelling the firm's own grouping on the same field would mean two different meanings competing for one relationship.

Group attributes come from the practice management system via the firm's data warehouse, so most are read-only in ClientVerse.

How to use it¶

To see a client's full picture, open the Brand Account rather than whichever record you landed on. Child Accounts and Related Companies hang off it, and the rolled-up figures live there. If revenue or matter counts look lower than expected, check whether you are looking at one entity rather than the whole brand.

To report on a firm-defined grouping, use the Client Group. It is searchable and reportable in its own right and works as a filter dimension in lists and searches, without disturbing the Account hierarchy.

Membership changes, and that is normal. Companies get reparented between groups as the firm's view of its relationships evolves. A group is a current opinion, not a permanent fact — so a report built on group membership is a snapshot, and comparing two periods needs care.

Rollups — what computes the group and brand aggregates.
Admin Guide — data quality and hierarchy administration.
Classification — the industry and geography tags a group carries.