# About Account Hierarchies

Similar to how an organizational hierarchy shows relationships between a company's employees, an account hierarchy shows relationships between a company's accounts, such as:

- Which accounts pay for other accounts,

- Which accounts can view other accounts' usage and cost information, and

- Which account cost information appears under specific company departments and/or cost centers.

An account hierarchy consists of the following:

- A single corporate account representing a client company,

- Any number of folders representing the company's departments and/or cost centers, and

- Any number of subscriber accounts, residing in the company's folders.

For guidelines on how to arrange a company's accounts and folders, see About Folders.

| Hint | To quickly populate a MetraNet hierarchy, only fill in the required properties (user name and password) when creating accounts and folders, and come back later to edit the accounts and enter other information. Alternatively, you can create Account Templates to cut down the number of properties you need to repetitively enter for each new account.

For details about the Hierarchy Tree View in Account Manager, see Hierarchy Tree View.

## An Example of an Account Hierarchy

The arrangement of accounts and folders in an account hierarchy can be as complex as any organization. However, the following is a simple example of a company organizational chart:

And here is how this organization might appear in a MetraNet account hierarchy:

Payer Accounts (marked with a P icon): These subscribers are responsible for paying all charges for other specified subscriber accounts (see About Payment Redirection). |  | Folder Owners (A folder owner's name appears after the folder owned): These subscribers can log into MetraView and see usage and cost information for all accounts in their respective departments (and their own accounts as well. See About Folder Ownership).