Understanding Customer and Sub-Customer Relationships in FieldEdge

Inside of FieldEdge, your Customer List is one of the most important assets to your business.

This list contains not only all of your Customers for your entire database, but it can also contain your Sub-Customers as well.

In this week’s blog, we will be diving into the differences between Customers and Sub-Customers at a surface level. 

 

What are Parent-Child Relationships? 

More common than not, you will hear Customers and Sub-Customers referred to as parent-child relationships. 

Since FieldEdge directly integrates with Quickbooks, these are terms that derive from an accounting background.  

The term parent-child relationship refers to the type of ownership a Customer or a business can have with one another. 

It is important to understand parent-child relationships even if you do not have an accounting background as the roles still apply to FieldEdge entirely. 

The Parent 

The parent of the parent-child relationship is the main Customer or location in the hierarchy. 

This Customer is typically either the main location, owns other locations, or is the “bill to” location. 

When you hear “parent”, think about what the word truly means. A parent takes care of their children’s wants or needs. 

The same rules apply to a Customer with Sub-Customers in an accounting setting. You would want the parent (Customer) to take care of everything for the child (Sub-Customer).

The Child

The child of a parent-child relationship is the Sub-Customer of a Customer in the hierarchy. 

Unlike the parent, there can be multiple children in a parent-child relationship due to the fact there are different uses for them. 

Children can be used for: 

  • Additional commercial locations 
  • Additional residential locations
  • Jobs inside of FieldEdge 
  • Act as another parent to another child

When you hear “child,” think about how a child acts in relation to a parent. 

A child is taken care of by a parent. 

A child may need something, but it’s the parents responsibility to take care of that needWhen we think about a parent-child relationship inside of FieldEdge, those exact rules apply here. 

The child (Sub-Customer) is taken care of by the parent (Customer). 

The main responsibility of billing usually falls on the parent location.

Understanding the Hierarchy  

Now that we dove into parent-child relationships on a surface level, let’s talk about understanding the hierarchy of the relationships.

Parent First

When you look at your Customers list inside of FieldEdge, you may notice an indentation or two on a  few of your Customers. 

This is the parent-child relationship in action: 

Snippet showing the parent-child relationship in FieldEdge in Action, with a sub-customer, or child, under/within the main customer, or parent.

The parent will always be at the top of the hierarchy, while the children will be underneath the parent.  

This example is easy to follow. 

You can see that Abner Jack is the parent (Customer) to the child Abner Jack – 1009 (the Sub-Customer). 

However, it is very common to get tripped up when the children become parents themselves.  

Children as Parents 

Even though there will always be one main location (parent) there are times when a child themselves become a parent. 

For instance, think about this as locations: 

  • A Company can be the main parent with children. 
  • One of those children end up owning a company themselves
  • This child will then become a parent to the company they own, while still being a child to the main parent.  

In the same example, we have “Abner, Jack,” however, we zoomed out even more to see more of the hierarchy:

Snippet showing a deeper look at the sub-customers under a customer in FieldEdge

  • Abner Jack, is still the main location (parent). 
  • Jack has two other children: His 1009 location, and Rose Abner. 
  • However, Rose is not only a child location, but a parent location to Julien, as well. 
    • You can see this is the case as there is a larger indent in the hierarchy for Julien underneath Rose. 
    • Therefore, Rose is the parent of Julien, but the child of Jack.

Want more information on parent-child relationships? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered next week, when we will look at how to create these relationships, as well as how to set up billing for them. 

Need more help on parent-child relationships in FieldEdge? We understand how confusing this can be. Reach out to us to schedule your free discovery call today!

Struggling to make sense of all the information on your Customer Pages? Check out last week’s post to learn more about how Attachments can aid in your bookkeeping.

Learn how we can help your business transition into FieldEdge workflows that best perform for you. Our team at Powerhouse Consulting Group is a certified partner with FieldEdge. We will work with you to understand your workflow, audit your FieldEdge settings, and can provide hands-on training for your team.