Defining your account structure
For general guidelines on choosing your account structure, refer to Defining your account structure.
Let's assume you're a Dutch merchant with an online business selling tea to customers in the EU. Your legal entity is in the Netherlands, and you also have one physical store in Amsterdam.
Below, we show the simplest possible set up for your business, and how it can change as your business grows: when you launch a new legal entity, and decide to manage certain regions separately. We also show how you can use account groups to more easily manage a group of merchant accounts.
Minimal account structure
When you first sign up with Adyen, you get:
- A company account TeaShop
- A merchant account TeaShop_ECOM for your online business.
Since separate merchant accounts are needed for processing ecommerce and point-of-sale payments, you need to create another merchant account for your physical store, TeaShop_POS. This is the simplest account structure that you could have.
You will receive separate reports and payouts for the two merchant accounts, while invoicing is done at the company level.
New legal entity
After some time, you decide to start shipping tea to customers in the US. To be able to make use of Adyen's local acquiring connections for reduced interchange and scheme fees, you launch a new legal entity in the US.
Since you have a separate legal entity in the US, you now need to add a new merchant account for processing in the US. Let's call this new merchant account TeaShop_US_ECOM.
You will receive separate reports and payouts for all your three merchant accounts. Since the legal entity linked to TeaShop_US_ECOM is different from the legal entity linked to your company account (your original legal entity in the Netherlands), you will receive separate invoices for the new merchant account in the US. The invoice for the merchant accounts TeaShop_ECOM and TeaShop_POS is generated at the company level as before.
Managing regions separately
Your business in the Netherlands and Germany has grown so much that you decide it is time to start managing these accounts separately. You hire separate support and financial teams for both countries. You also want to have different payout accounts for receiving funds from these countries.
To be able to split funds, reporting, and user permissions, you need to create separate merchant accounts for Germany and the Netherlands — let's call these TeaShop_DE_ECOM and TeaShop_NL_ECOM.
You will keep the account TeaShop_ECOM for any EU business outside of Germany and the Netherlands. You will receive separate reports and payouts for all your five merchant accounts. The new accounts TeaShop_DE_ECOM and TeaShop_NL_ECOM are linked to your legal entity in the Netherlands, and therefore you will receive a joint invoice for these (together with TeaShop_ECOM and TeaShop_POS) at the company level.
Managing a group of merchant accounts
Now that you have more merchant accounts, you might find it useful to create account groups.
If you have team members who manage accounts across the EU, you could create an Account group EU containing all your accounts in the EU: TeaShop_DE_ECOM, TeaShop_NL_ECOM, TeaShop_ECOM, and TeaShop_POS.
This allows you to quickly give access to all merchant account in the EU. Users with access to the account group can furthermore search payments across all merchant accounts in the EU.