Organizational Hierarchy
An introduction to the Noviship hierarchy of customer management
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An introduction to the Noviship hierarchy of customer management
Last updated
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Every person who logs in to the system is a User. Users exist within Organizations which you can generally think of as Customer Accounts. In an enterprise setting there will be business relationships between various entities that don't fit neatly in to the Vendor-Customer structure.
Although all users exist in Customer Accounts, there are containers that represent the organizational hierarchy. These are Partners and Associates.
The Partner is the top level in the hierarchy of users, above Associate. Partners are responsible for Courier Accounts. Partners are completely isolated from one another. Their users cannot interact in any way with other partners - not even to transfer shipments. Partners are necessarily also Cost Partners and therefore price the shipments at cost, according to the carrier’s bills.
Partners manage Associates, which can be business relationships or simply collections (an Association) of customers with some common properties.
Each Partner has an Administrator Account which must exist within one of the Associates belonging to the Partner. This account holds the users who operate the partnership and manage the associates. When a Cost Invoice is posted for an Associate, it is posted by this Administrator account.
An Associate is a level in the hierarchy below Partner. Associates are Cost Partners (which means they pay the courier cost price for shipments).
Sometimes it is useful to group your customers by some property and use the functions of an Associate to manage them. You can do that without a relationship with an actual Associate - it is just a name after all. The term for that entity is an Association (of customers).
Associates have various properties that apply to the customers within them. Many of these are default settings that the customer accounts can override.
Each Associate has an Administrator Account (also called a Billing Account). A single Customer Account can be the Administrator Account for multiple Associates (which is useful when the Associate is simply a structural grouping of customers rather than a business relationship).
The Reseller is simply a Customer account set to the Reseller class. Any Customer account can be switched to being a Reseller simply by changing this property. Customers can optionally be assigned to a Reseller and if they aren't they simply customers of the Associate.
What makes a Reseller distinct is that when a shipment is billed to a customer of a reseller, the reseller is automatically billed at the same time for the shipment but as if they themselves bought it. In other words, the reseller is billed at the account rate for shipments that their customers buy. It is expected that customers of resellers will remit payment to (and be invoiced by) their reseller.
Every user exists within a Customer account. That account is offered services at a particular price and is invoiced for those services at what is called the Customer Price. Remember that every user belongs to a Customer Account, even if that user is the administrator of a partnership.
Let's consider a company that runs a Courier enterprise and owns several courier accounts called Primary Shipping. It is our Partner. Primary Shipping has their own customers that use their accounts with a markup. Let's call one of these customers Joe Corp.
Primary Shipping wishes to enter in to a relationship with another courier operation called Acme Shipping. Acme has an account of their own but wish to access Primary Shipping's other accounts too. They have a customer called Ace Corp. Primary Shipping makes them an Associate.
Primary Shipping meets another company (Responsive Legal) that is not in the shipping industry, and have no courier accounts, but they have lots of customers (law firms, one of which is Legal Inc) who need a lot of priority courier services. Responsive wants to leverage and profit from all these relationships. So Primary Shipping makes them a Reseller.
Acme Shipping (our Associate) also wants to bring in a reseller called Reactive Clothing who have a lot of clients all over the world who need international shipping and help with managing it all. One of the clients is called Cloth Corp.
Here's how this looks if we draw out the relationships:
Remember that all the entities in our hierarchy are represented by Customer Accounts so if we add in the Management Accounts for the Partner and two Associates, this is what it looks like:
In our example, Primary Shipping is responsible for the reconciliation. This means that Acme Shipping, who have their own account, send their account billing data (EDI) to Primary to process.
Each billing cycle, Primary Shipping will process EDI files and post Customer Invoices for customers within their Customer Scope and Cost Invoices for customers within their Cost Scope.
Management Accounts have a Scope which represents the customers for whom they can issue invoices. Every Partner has a single Management Account which issues Cost Invoices to every other Management Account under that Partner. This is the Cost Scope. Each Management Account can issue Customer Invoices to every Customer account under them in the hierarchy. This is the Customer Scope.
This is what the invoice issuing process looks like:
