Step-by-step walkthrough
Standing up an Account Hierarchy from scratch
Seven steps from creating the first Account to bulk-onboarding your full customer base.
Create the Account record
In the Admin Portal Accounts module, create the master Account record for the company. Capture Company Name, Key / ID, Description, Tax Exemption Number, and Tax Entity Use Code. The Account holds every commercial term that should flow to every User on the team.
Add Users under the Account
Create User records for each contact at the company: First Name, Last Name, Display Name, Phone, Fax, Email. Multiple Users can be associated with a single Account, but each User belongs to exactly one Account.
Assign Roles and permissions
The Roles module exposes hundreds of granular access points. Assign each User the Role that matches their job (buyer, viewer, manager, finance, super-admin) with the permissions that role requires and nothing it doesn't.
Build the shared Address Book
Add the Account's billing and shipping addresses. Entries are shared across all Users under the Account and dynamically populate the Payment Sections of both Checkout and the Invoice Details page. Add once, everyone sees it.
Apply customer-specific pricing
Tag the Account with the appropriate pricing tier or contract. The Multi-Tiered Pricing engine applies the right prices the moment any User on the Account logs in, including quantity-break tiers and account-specific overrides.
Set Account Balance and Credit Limit
For pre-paid contract customers, set the Account Balance and Credit Limit so any authorized User can complete checkout using Account Credit. Manage limits in the Admin Portal or sync them from your ERP customer master through Clarity Connect.
Bulk-import your existing customer base
Onboard your existing B2B customers via the Import Customers / Users workflow: one spreadsheet of Accounts, one of Users, role assignments inline. Thousands of customer relationships transferred from a legacy cart or ERP in a single import.
Benefits & business impact: what a real account model delivers.
Getting Account Hierarchy right does more than clean up your data model. It reshapes how your B2B customers interact with you, how your AR team operates, and how predictable your sales cycle becomes.
Faster procurement throughput
Every member of the procurement team buys with their own login and their own permissions. No more “send the password to John,” no more email approvals copy-pasted into the cart, no more weekly delays waiting for one shared user to be free.
Audit trail that holds up
Every order is attributed to the specific User who placed it. Sales Groups tie quotes, orders, sub-orders, and invoices into one chain. Compliance and finance audits get clean answers without forensic spreadsheet work.
Customer-specific pricing accuracy
Because pricing tier and contract live on the Account, every User on that Account sees the right prices automatically. No more “buyer A got the right price but buyer B got list” phone calls.
CFO & finance visibility
A finance-Role User on the Account sees every open quote, every order in flight, every invoice due, and every dollar of pre-paid credit remaining, without ever having placed an order themselves.
Eliminated shared-login risk
Shared logins are a compliance and security disaster: no accountability, no audit, no easy way to deactivate a former employee. Per-User logins under the Account close that hole without slowing the team down.
Scales to thousands of accounts
Whether you're onboarding 50 distributors or 5,000 enterprise customers, the model holds: bulk import gets you live fast, ERP sync keeps records aligned, and role-based access keeps every customer's team operating cleanly.
The people who benefit span every B2B persona: buyers get a clean account-aware experience without re-keying their own context every visit, managers get approval visibility without becoming a bottleneck, finance teams get audit-ready order and invoice history, CFOs and controllers get the panoramic view they need without having to do the buying themselves, and your own sales and AR teams stop spending hours each week patching up problems that exist only because the account model wasn't right to start with.