Skip to main content

​
Overview

Customer families allow you to model hierarchical relationships between customers, such as a parent company and its subsidiaries, a headquarters and regional offices, or a holding entity and its portfolio companies. A customer family consists of one parent customer and one or more child customers. This structure is a prerequisite for features like roll-up billing, where subscriptions belonging to child customers are invoiced to the parent.

​
Who This Is For

​
How Customer Families Work

A customer family is a single-level hierarchy:
  • A parent customer is any customer that has one or more children assigned to it. There is no explicit “make this a parent” action; a customer becomes a parent when another customer is assigned to it as a child.
  • A child customer is any customer with a parent customer assigned. A child can have at most one parent.
  • A standalone customer has no parent and no children.
There is no support for multi-level nesting. A parent customer cannot itself be a child of another customer.

​
Configuration & Usage

​
Creating a Child Customer

When creating a new customer, the Parent Customer (Optional) field allows you to assign a parent.
A parent-child customer relationship enables optional features, for example the ability to bill the parent for the child’s subscription(s).
Only customers that do not already have a parent are available for selection. This prevents circular or multi-level hierarchies. Via the Dashboard:
  1. Navigate to Customers and click New Customer.
  2. Fill in the standard customer fields (name, email, address, etc.).
  3. In the Parent Customer (Optional) dropdown, select the desired parent.
  4. Save the customer.
Via the API: Include the parentCustomerId field when creating a customer:

​
Changing or Removing a Parent

You can update or clear a customer’s parent at any time from the customer’s Profile page. Via the Dashboard:
  1. Navigate to the child customer’s profile.
  2. In the Parent field, select a different parent or clear the selection.
  3. Save changes.
Via the API: To change the parent:
To remove the parent:

​
Viewing Family Relationships

  • A child customer’s profile displays its parent as a clickable link.
  • A parent customer’s profile lists its children.

​
System Behavior & Guarantees

​
Edge Cases & Special Scenarios

  • Removing a parent from a child with active roll-up subscriptions: The system recalculates billing schedules. Future invoices will be billed directly to the (now standalone) customer instead of the former parent.
  • Reassigning a child to a different parent: Billing schedules for the old parent, new parent, and the child are all recalculated automatically.
  • Currency alignment: There is no system-enforced currency constraint between parent and child customers. However, roll-up billing requires subscriptions within a family to use the same currency for consolidated invoicing to work correctly.

​
Impact on Other Parts of Alguna

​
Examples

​
Enterprise with Regional Subsidiaries

Scenario: Acme Corp has three regional offices. Finance wants a single consolidated invoice. Each regional office has its own subscription. With roll-up billing enabled on each child subscription, Acme Corp receives a single invoice containing line items grouped by subsidiary.

​
FAQ

Can a customer be both a parent and a child? No. Only one level of nesting is supported. A customer that already has a parent cannot be selected as a parent for another customer. What happens to child customers if I delete the parent? Child customers are not deleted. Their parent reference is cleared, making them standalone customers. Any roll-up billing on their subscriptions is recalculated. Does assigning a parent automatically consolidate billing? No. The parent-child relationship is a structural prerequisite. Roll-up billing must be explicitly enabled on each child subscription. See Roll-Up Billing. Can I change a customer’s parent after subscriptions are active? Yes. The system automatically recalculates billing schedules for all affected parties. Existing issued invoices are not modified; changes apply to future billing periods. Is there a limit to how many children a parent can have? There is no system-enforced limit on the number of child customers.