Introduction to Entity and Entity Hierarchy

Name and display name

Each entity has a name and a display name. The name of the entity is the entity identifier, which must be unique across all entities in a multi-entity hierarchy. Only alphanumeric characters (letters A–Z and a–z, and digits 0–9), space, period, and hyphen are allowed to be used in entity names. The display name of the entity is the name shown in the Zuora UI and APIs. The maximum length of the name or the display name is 255 characters.

You can set or edit the entity name and display name in Administration > Manage Entity Hierarchy as a global entity administrator.

Global entity

The global entity is the root entity of the entity hierarchy.

After Multi-entity is enabled for a tenant, the tenant is migrated from a single-entity environment to a multi-entity environment, in which the global entity is automatically provisioned. If you have data in the single-entity environment, all your tenant data is migrated to the global entity. By default, the global entity display name is the tenant name and the global entity name is "Global". All tenant users (administrators and standard users) are set to be the global entity users. You are not allowed to remove the global entity from the multi-entity hierarchy.

All the administrators of the global entity have permission to manage entities in the multi-entity hierarchy. By default, an administrator can only access the entities that are created by themselves and cannot access the entities that are created by the other administrators. So we recommend that you assign only one administrator to manage the entity hierarchy.

The difference between the global entity and sub-entities is that the global entity users have more permissions than the sub-entities users:

• Global entity administrators can manage the entity hierarchy.
• Global entity administrators can create, edit, provision, or remove entities.
• Global entity users can share business objects with other entities.
• Global entity administrators can configure the security policies.

Unique sequence numbers

In a multi-entity hierarchy, each entity has unique sequence numbers for the following objects:

• User name
• SKU
• Subscription number
• Charge number
• Invoice number
• Payment number

We recommend that you also define the following number formats for each entity:

• Account number 
• Charge number
• Amendment number

See Define Numbering and SKU Formats for more information.

Time zone and locale

Each entity can set its own time zone and locale in the Zuora UI.

• If the entity is not provisioned in the multi-entity hierarchy, see Edit the Unprovisioned Sub-entity Information.
• If the entity is provisioned in the multi-entity hierarchy, see Edit the Provisioned Sub-entity Information.

See Tenant Settings for more information about time zone and locales.

Notification

Each entity can configure notifications separately without affecting the other entities.

To identify which entity sends the notifications, you can:

• Specify different values for the From Name and From Email fields in each entity when you create or edit an email template.
• Use the entity ID and entity name merge fields for administrative notifications. See System merge fields for email and callout templates for more information.

Custom fields

Each entity can continue to have separate custom field definitions that do not affect the other entities. However, if needed, custom field definitions can be shared between the global entity and its sub-entities. You cannot delete a custom field while it is shared with sub-entities. See Custom fields for more information.