Parent-Child Account Best Practices

Overview

You can create parent‐child account relationships to group accounts together based on your business needs.

Examples:

• You have customers who want to add child accounts for individuals who will use services billed to the parent account or to the child accounts.
• You are a reseller that wants to add your clients as child accounts that will use services billed to the parent account or to the child accounts.
• You are a company that wants to add your departments as child accounts that will use services billed to the parent account or to the child accounts.

There are three different responsibility levels associated with child accounts as described in the table below:

You can assign payment responsibility to a master plan instance (MPI) from any account in a parent pay child account's ancestry:

• by using these APIs: assign_acct_plan_m, create_acct_complete_m, set_payment_responsibility_m, update_acct_complete_m, update_acct_plan_m, and update_acct_plan_multi_m. (Please see the documentation for the <resp_level_cd> input field in the respective APIs for more information.)

      OR

• in the Aria application when you create an account, add a plan to an existing account, or create/update a parent-child account relationship.

Example: a parent pay child account can have a responsible MPI from a "grandparent" account.

Prerequisites

Based on your business needs, set your chosen client parameters that apply to parent‐child accounts as described in Provisioning Setting Parameters. You can find these parameters in the Aria application under Configuration > Notifications> Provisioning Settings.

Important Notes

• The responsible MPI from the parent account must be a self pay plan.
• For simplicity, the words "parent" and "child" are used generically throughout Aria's documentation to refer to customers in a hierarchy of accounts. Example: the "parent account" responsible for a "child account's" plan may actually be a "grandparent" account.
  
  For any account in a hierarchy, you can identify the “chief” account, which is the ancestor at the highest level. This information is returned by the <chief_acct_info> output in these APIs: create_acct_complete_m, get_acct_details_all_m, get_acct_hierarchy_details_m, and update_acct_complete_m. Example: if you have a child account with a parent and "grandparent", you can identify the "grandparent" account as the “chief” account.
  
  In the Aria application, you can see a diagram showing any parent, children or "grandchildren" for an account by viewing the account hierarchy.
• For more information please see the additional important notes about parent‐child accounts.

Best Practices

Refunds

If you need to refund a payment for a child invoice that was paid by a parent account holder, you can issue the refund to the parent account and you can choose to also reverse one or more of the child invoice line items to which the refund applies.

Example: If a child account was charged in error you can issue a refund to the parent account holder, then
reverse one or more child invoice line items.

Parent and Child Account Currencies

If you create a child account with parent pay responsibility, the parent and child accounts must be assigned the same currency. This may reduce potential errors resulting from different currency balances being rolled up together at the parent level.

For additional best practices and preconditions related to account registration in general, please see Account Registration Best Practices.

Move Self/Parent Pay MPIs from Dunning when Paying Parent Account Charges 

The dunning functionality related to parent-pay master plan instances (MPIs) was changed in Release 41. It is now required that dunning groups are associated with MPIs. So, even if a dunning group is not provided by the client upon MPI assignment, an empty dunning group (one containing no attributes) will be created and assigned to the MPI automatically.

Use Cases

Click on any of the links below to see instructions for implementing a few basic parent-child account uses cases with APIs:

1. Create a Child Account with Self Pay Responsibility
2. Create a Child Account with a Parent Pay Plan and Aligned Billing Dates
3. Create a Child Account with a Self Pay Order and a Parent Pay Plan

For additional rules that apply to parent-child use cases, please see the important notes about parent‐child accounts.

 

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Subtopics 

Important Notes about Parent-child Accounts
Account Registration Best Practices
Aria Crescendo Developer’s Guide
Create Parent-Child Account Relationships