Account families describe the relationship between different business entities or specific sites within a corporate family. When one business entity has financial or legal responsibility for another business, it creates a headquarters to the subsidiary relationship. These relationships are shown in the data with three fields:
Account ID: Gives an account at a specific location a unique identifier.
Parent Account ID: Indicates the parent entity for the account.
Ultimate Parent ID: Indicates the account at the very top of the corporate hierarchy, which owns all of the subsidiaries.
Fullcast allows you to control how and whether you consider account families when creating rules and when making manual account to territory moves.
Note
Account families with good data quality will give better results. The account hierarchies policy creates and maintains account families and account hierarchy. The policies works in conjunction with the territory plan to ensure tight integration between coverage design and the execution policies.
How Fullcast decides where a family lands
When you choose how to treat account families, you're telling Fullcast which relationship field to follow when it decides where each account goes. Each option reads a different field:
Do not reassign child accounts uses no family field. Every account is matched on its own against the segment rule.
Assign all child accounts and Assign child accounts that match the following criteria both follow the Parent Account ID. A child goes where its parent goes — either all children, or only those that meet your criteria. Both depend on the parent being present in the segment and its data being accurate.
Group all accounts belonging to the same corporate family follows the Ultimate Parent ID, the account at the very top of the corporate hierarchy. Because it reads the ultimate parent rather than the direct parent, it keeps a family together even when the direct parent is missing from the segment or the parent data is incomplete.
Where you apply the option changes what's in scope:
When you create or rebuild territories, the rule evaluates every account, and the option decides which accounts follow their family and which are matched on their own.
When you move accounts between nodes, only accounts in the node you're moving from are in scope for the parent-based options. Group is the exception: it can pull the whole corporate family together into the destination.
Options to treat account families
When you create territories or move accounts from one node to another, select how account families are treated from the available options. Each option checks against a specific field to move or assign territories to the appropriate segment.
Do not reassign child accounts to the same segment
Description
Excludes any family relationships and matches all the accounts based on the specified segment hierarchy rule (unique values or buckets). All the accounts, regardless of account family, will be matched, and any record that matches the rules will be assigned to the respective segment.
Identifying field
None
Use cases
You route accounts based on where they are and what they do, rather than who owns them.
Your segmentation is geographic or firmographic (region, industry, or company size), and each site should stand on its own regardless of its corporate family.
Assign all child accounts to the same segment
Description
The parent account is evaluated against the rules, and if there are any child accounts directly related to the parent (identified by the Parent Account ID), they will be moved to the segment the parent is assigned to. The scope includes not only the direct children but also the entire children hierarchy under that parent.
When you create territories: Only the children of the parents that are matched will be moved with the parent. If a parent account is not available in the selected segment, each child account is individually evaluated against the segment hierarchy criteria and assigned independently.
When you move accounts: Only the parents and related child accounts within the source node are considered. All children outside the source node will not be considered for the move.
Identifying field
parentId
Use cases
You route accounts based on who owns them rather than where the individual branches are located.
A single owner or team covers an entire corporate family, and every branch should follow the parent's territory.
Your Parent Account ID data is clean and complete, and you want the whole child hierarchy to move with the parent.
Assign child accounts that match the following criteria to the same segment as the parent
Description
The parent account is evaluated against the rules, and specific criteria (identified by the Parent Account ID field and the criteria you add) determine whether any child accounts qualify to be moved with the parent. Click Add Row and select the appropriate fields to add criteria.
When you create territories: Select the correct field and type options in the account families menu to keep the number of territories created within a manageable number. When you create segments with criteria for children accounts, it's easy to fill out the primary field as segmentation criteria, but it is important not to create unique values for high numbers of records, as this only crowds the segment hierarchy.
Identifying field
parentId
Use cases
You want to keep the accounts that belong to a family within a particular region (all US accounts of a family), but evaluate the rest of the children independently.
Only some subsidiaries should follow the parent (for example, same-country or same-segment children), while the others follow the standard rules.
Group all accounts belonging to the same corporate family into one segment
Description
This option lets subsidiaries stay together regardless of whether the parent is in the segment. It reads the Ultimate Parent ID to identify the full corporate family, then keeps that family together. Use it when you are missing the parent or some parent data.
When you create territories: The family is consolidated into the segment where the majority of its accounts would be assigned, identified by the Ultimate Parent ID.
When you move accounts: The whole corporate family is grouped and moved together into the destination node, identified by the Ultimate Parent ID.
Identifying field
ultimateParentId
Use cases
You route accounts based on collective presence and majority volume, keeping a corporate family together even when parent account data is missing or incomplete.
Your Parent Account ID data is unreliable across the book, but the Ultimate Parent ID is populated, and you still want the family consolidated.
A family is split across regions, and you want it to land where the bulk of it already sits rather than forcing it to the parent's headquarters location.
One team covers a large corporate family, and you need every subsidiary in one segment so ownership and targets roll up cleanly.
Where you'll see these options
The account-family options appear in the same form wherever Fullcast assigns accounts to a segment:
Every hierarchy (segment) creation rule type, no matter which rule you use to build the hierarchy.
The Move accounts flow, when you move accounts from one node to another (a single move or a file upload).
Smart Plan, under How do you want to treat account families in this segment?
The Change Owner action in Salesforce, when you reassign accounts and their children.