---
title: "Account structure"
description: "Understand account structures to design a platform that suits your business needs."
url: "https://docs.adyen.com/managed-model/account-structure"
source_url: "https://docs.adyen.com/managed-model/account-structure.md"
canonical: "https://docs.adyen.com/managed-model/account-structure"
last_modified: "2026-10-09T12:57:19+02:00"
language: "en"
---

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# Account structure

Understand account structures to design a platform that suits your business needs.

## Company account

When you sign up for an Adyen account, you receive a **company account**, which represents your core business entity with us. Under your company account, you must create merchant accounts for your users.

## Merchant accounts

Merchant accounts represent the users of your platform. The merchant account is where you configure payment methods and processing currencies for your user, override risk management rules set at company level, and receive the reports used for reconciliation. When a customer of your user makes a payment, the payment is processed through their merchant account. If your user supports both online and in-person payments (such as when implementing an omnichannel approach), we recommend to use one merchant account for both channels.

Adyen pays out at the merchant account level. Merchant accounts must be associated with the legal entity that owns the bank account to which funds will be settled. If your users are accepting payments in multiple currencies, you may link multiple bank accounts to a single merchant account.

If your user has multiple legal entities, you must create a separate merchant account for each legal entity. For example, you may not associate a single merchant account to a US and a French legal entity.

### Sales channels

When requesting a merchant account, you have to select the sales channel. Besides [ecommerce](https://docs.adyen.com/online-payments) and [in-person payments](https://docs.adyen.com/point-of-sale), it is also possible to merge both sales channels into one omnichannel merchant account that we call our **unified commerce** solution. With [Unified Commerce](https://docs.adyen.com/unified-commerce), all payment data feeds into the same system. This lets your users deliver a wealth of cross-channel experiences, keep reconciliation simple, and capture rich customer insights.

## Stores

Under a merchant level, one or more stores represent the physical store locations, and are used to process point-of-sale transactions. For more information, refer to [Account structure for in-person payments](https://docs.adyen.com/point-of-sale/design-your-integration/determine-account-structure).

## Example account structure

The diagram below shows an example account structure, including merchant accounts with different sales channels representing your users.

![This is an example account structure of a platform setup - managed model.](https://docs.adyen.com/media/f96cf6413b258fdef7b1218c3e2a7941c88c00bcc41ebe0fe44a842a2074d125.svg?decoding=auto\&fetchpriority=auto)