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Account Types: Overview & Example Use Cases

Mitchell Paul-Soumis Updated by Mitchell Paul-Soumis

Read Time: 2 mins

What are Account Types?

Account Types in Sonar represent a categorization method for various Accounts added into your instance. These categories serve two main purposes:

  1. Identification of accounts in reporting and at a glance in the account list
  2. Assigning Billing Defaults

Functionally, Account Types are simply another layer of distinction on accounts, similar to account groups and account names.

Using Account Types

Account Types are used specifically to identify and associate accounts together, which would share similar billing practices, network activation, and reporting.

While Account types do contain 3 default categories - Residential, Commercial, and Government - additional Account Types can be added to your instance to allow you to further distinguish accounts on your service.

Creating a New Account Type

  • Assign a name to your new Account Type. This name is what will be displayed in the account itself, as well as on reports
  • Select a color for easy identification. This can be done with a color picker, or by using the HEX code for the color
  • Select an icon. Same as the color, this is used purely as an additional layer of identification
  • The underlying type of this custom created Account Type is used for Sonar's Tax Automation, dictating how accounts of this type are treated in places that Sonar differentiates between commercial and residential accounts (ex: in FCC form 477).
  • The Invoice Message allows you to attach a message created under Financial -> Invoice Messages to all invoices generated for this account type.

How Account Types Interact Within Sonar

Account Types in Sonar exist primarily to simplify organization, allowing you to filter the account view by Account Types.

Customizing Account types offer further control, creating entirely new Account Types allows you to set more specific Billing Defaults for smaller groups of accounts. Custom Account types also allow you a custom naming scheme while retaining the central types for FCC Form 477.

Finally, Account Types can have specific Address Lists and RADIUS Groups attributed to them making network activation and management a breeze for individual account types.

Account Type Examples:

Listed below are some Common Custom Account Types, and why you may want to consider using them

Employee

An Employee Account Type is useful for quickly organizing all of your employees at a glance, while maintaining their residential distinction for tax automation purposes.

The other advantage of an employee Account Type is how it could function with an employee address list as well. For more information on Address Lists and their creation, check out that knowledge base article here.

Tower Host

A Tower Host Account Type allows you to assign a visible indicator to accounts where you're providing a data service to an address in return for them hosting your wireless service tower, allowing you to allocate IP addresses and services to this individual.

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Account Statuses: Overview & Example Use Cases

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