Role Hierarchy

The Role Hierarchy in CRM is the organizational structure that defines reporting relationships between user roles and determines data visibility inheritance — specifically, which roles can see records owned by roles below them in the hierarchy. A correctly configured role hierarchy means a sales manager automatically sees all opportunities owned by their team's reps without manual sharing rules for every record. The hierarchy also supports reporting rollups: team performance reports aggregate from individual rep records through manager roles to regional and company-level views. Role hierarchy design is one of the first and most important architectural decisions in a CRM implementation — it determines the organization's data visibility model and must accurately reflect how the business actually operates, not how an org chart theoretically represents it.