A bit about account structure

[brian_mullins]

When we were young and dumb, we just created a sub-account structure that mimicked what we had in our SIS. We had our root account, of course, and under that we had the following 3 sub-accounts:

1. Elementary
2. Middle
3. High
4. Special Schools

Under each we had additional sub-accounts for each school, organized appropriately. Wonderful!

At the end of our first year, as we prepped for the next school year, we needed a way to sepearate last year's courses from those for the coming year. We accomplished this by creating "archive" terms, and moved all of the prior year courses out of the standard Year, Semester, Quarter terms. Simple!

By the end of year 3 the run of the provisioning report was taking well over 5 hours to complete due to the fact that it had to be run at the root account to capture all of the current data without needed to run it multiple times. This wasn't going to be sustainable.

For year 4 (ish… this is pandemic time so everything is a bit fuzzy) we added another level of account structure. We moved to  a structure like this:

1. Active
1. Elementary
2. Middle
3. High
4. Special Schools
2. Archived
1. Elementary
2. Middle
3. High
4. Special Schools

Now our summer archive process would move courses to Archive terms and Archive accounts. This now made it possible for us to run the provisioning report in the Active account and exclude data from prior-year course. That took our sync run time down from over 8 hours to just under 1 hour. Phew!

I'd love to hear about your account structure and the why behind it!