# Corporate hierarchies

Kernel builds complete, flexible corporate hierarchies that reflect how companies actually operate - capturing every legal entity, subsidiary, and operating unit.

### GTM and legal hierarchies

Kernel supports two hierarchy perspectives:

* **Legal hierarchies** map the formal corporate ownership structure - holding companies, subsidiaries, and legal entities as registered in official filings.
* **GTM hierarchies** reflect how your sales teams engage with accounts - grouping entities by how you sell rather than how they're legally structured.

Both perspectives are maintained simultaneously, giving you the flexibility to plan territories, roll up revenue, and manage accounts in the way that matches your rules of engagement.

### Filling whitespace

Kernel identifies gaps in your CRM's hierarchy coverage and maps missing entities back to your accounts. This includes:

* **Missing parents** - parent companies that your child accounts should roll up to but are not yet in your CRM
* **Missing subsidiaries** - operating units, regional entities, or establishments that exist but are not represented in your CRM
* **Incomplete trees** - partial hierarchies where intermediate entities are missing, breaking the chain between a child and its ultimate parent

Kernel uses AI-driven research to discover these entities, drawing on public filings, company websites, regulatory data, and other authoritative sources. Discovered entities are provided for review and can be ingested into your CRM to complete the hierarchy.

### Ingesting family trees

Kernel provides the proposed hierarchy for review before any changes are made to your CRM. This can be delivered as:

* **Flat file (CSV)** - a clear mapping of proposed parent-child relationships for offline review. Upon approval, Kernel creates missing accounts and populates the Parent Account field using Salesforce Account IDs.
* **Custom object** - Kernel builds the hierarchy natively using the digital twin (see [custom object](/custom-object.md)). Missing entities are created as `Kernel_Account__c` records that can be promoted to full accounts.

### How it works

For each account in your CRM, Kernel traverses the corporate tree, analysing each entity in detail. Research is cached and reused across accounts in the same family, and each parent-child relationship carries a confidence score and evidence trail.


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