External Account Hierarchies Considerations

When using an external account hierarchy, be aware of these considerations:

• Child account data is shared with the highest role at each level within the external account hierarchy.
• If Grant Access Using Hierarchies is enabled on a custom object, data shared with or owned by users is visible to the roles above those users. If Grant Access Using Hierarchies is disabled, data shared with or owned by a user isn’t visible to users in roles above them.
• You can add up to five hierarchical levels in an external account hierarchy. Contact your Salesforce account executive if you need more levels.
• You can use an external account hierarchy only for business accounts, not person accounts.
• External account hierarchies are incompatible with account role optimization (ARO).
• Internal owners of child accounts that participate in an external account hierarchy can’t manage external users in the account that they own. They lose access to the records owned by those users.
• Accounts used in an external account hierarchy can’t be merged with another account.
• An external account hierarchy must have at least one role. If a user attempts to delete the last role in an account that belongs to an external account hierarchy, the user gets an error.
• The hierarchy can contain either a partner account or a customer account, but not both.
• You can’t use a customer or partner account in more than one active external account hierarchy.
• You can have up to 100,000 external account hierarchy records per org.