Customer records in Maxio Advanced Billing can be organized into Customer Hierarchies to represent business structures such as resellers, multi-national, or multi-subsidiary. Within these structures, it is also possible to designate who is responsible for payment for the services within the Customer Hierarchy. In Maxio, we call this feature ‘WhoPays’ and it can be configured for a variety of scenarios.
A customer with a parent who is responsible for paying their subscription.
Enablement & Settings
Customer Hierarchies and WhoPays are enabled from the Setting menu in the Config section of the application. The features are separate, but connected, as follows:
- Customer Hierarchies can be enabled without WhoPays. This is useful if you just want to define the relationships between your customer base (i.e. parent / child relationships) but are not interested in having anyone but the customer pay for themselves.
- WhoPays requires that Customer Hierarchies also be enabled. This is because payment responsibility may only be assigned to another customer in the same hierarchy (i.e. an ancestor may be the payer, but another unrelated customer may not be the payer)
When enabling WhoPays, a “Default Payer & Consolidation” may be selected. This default is used for any subscriptions created for a customer that has a parent. This default will apply unless another responsible payer is chosen at the time of subscription creation.
- Customer (separate invoices): The subscription will not be grouped and will be invoiced individually. This creates a normal, standalone subscription.
- Customer (consolidated invoices): The subscription will be grouped with other subscriptions for this same customer. This results in consolidated invoices for all subscriptions created with this setting enabled.
- Parent: The subscription will be grouped with it’s parent’s default subscription group and paid by the parent.
- Eldest Ancestor: The subscription will be grouped with the eldest ancestor in the hierarchy.
Customer Hierarchies
Customer Hierarchies allow customers to be grouped into parent / child relationships, which can be used purely for organization or for setting payment responsibilities via WhoPays. Customer Hierarchies don’t necessarily require WhoPays, but it does open up the option to select the responsible payer when needed.
To create a hierarchy for existing customers, navigate to the customer that will be setup as the child in the relationship and select the option to Choose Parent from the Customer Hierarchy section. It is also possible to create a new customer and assign a parent directly from the new subscription form - learn more about that in the WhoPays section below.
From the following screen, choose a customer record to be the parent, preview the new relationship, and confirm. This will set the parent on the customer and will now also display any older relatives in the hierarchy (grandparents, great grandparents, etc).
It’s also possible to create new child customers for an existing customer by selecting the option to Add new customer as Child at the bottom of the section. This will display a new customer form and will set the current customer as the parent.
Limitations
- A parent customer record may have unlimited child customer records.
- However, a hierarchy is limited to a depth of 10 customer records.
- Currently, a Public Signup Page cannot be used to create subscriptions with hierarchies, groups, or WhoPays. The options are available within the app and via API.
Parent/Child Relationships cannot be broken at this time.
Set the Hierarchy
The following workflow explains how to add a Parent-Child relationship structure to a subscription.
Add a Parent
- Navigate to Customers, find the customer you would like to set as a child to the hierarchy, and click View.
- Scroll down to the Customer Hierarchy section and click Choose Parent.
- Select the Parent Customer and click Preview Selected.
- Click Confirm to set the hierarchy.
The Customer Hierarchy now shows the newly added Parent:
Add a Child
To add a Child to the hierarchy you can either:
- Create a new Customer to add as a child.
OR - Choose a Child from a list of existing Customers.
Delete a Parent or Child
To delete a Parent or Child from the hierarchy, you simply click Remove.
However, you can only remove a Parent or a Child from the hierarchy:
- If the Parent/Child Subscriptions are not in a group.
OR - If the Parent/Child Subscriptions are in a group and there are no open/canceled/pending invoices. Note, removing a Parent/Child from the hierarchy also removes the given Parent/Child from the group.
Create Subscription Group
This workflow will walk you through how to create a subscription group that will be the basis of consolidating other invoices.
- From Subscriptions, click Create New Subscription.
- Click Create Customer.
- Fill in all required information and click Submit.
- Select Consolidated Invoices to ensure the Subscription is created in a group.
- Complete the Subscription details and click Create Subscription.
The Subscription group is created.
Add Existing Subscription to a Group
This workflow assumes you have followed the instructions on how to create a subscription group. We also assume that you have two subscriptions that share the same customer ID or is a parent in a hierarchy with child subscriptions.
Select “a group” to view the group.
Select "Manage Group" to add new subscriptions.
View / add / remove members.
Confirm details of group addition.
View new/all members of the group.
View subscription group and members in subscription list.
Add New Subscription to Existing Group
This workflow assumes you have an existing group. How to create a new customer is omitted for brevity, but covered above. How to edit / manage subscription groups is omitted for brevity. Additionally, it assumes you have an understanding of how parent-child relationships work in Advanced Billing.
Edit new customer and add a parent to the hierarchy.
Select the parent for the new customer.
Confirm relationship.
Create new subscription with existing customer.
In the above image, we're creating a new subscription in Advanced Billing. We're using the existing "New Group Member" customer. This customer has a parent that will be used in the next steps.
Confirmation of subscription in a group with WhoPays assigned.
Assign WhoPays to a Subscription
This workflow assigns WhoPays to a new subscription It assumes you have existing customers and hierarchies To begin, create a new subscription Select an existing customer that is in a hierarchy with an assigned parent or, create a new customer and select a parent on-the-fly.
Select existing customer.