1. Purpose
Make a carrier account held by a parent organization available to its child organizations, so those children can buy labels on it.
2. Scope
Publishing an existing carrier account from a parent organization down to its children, and adding it on the child side. Creating the account with the carrier in the first place is out of scope. Building the rate charts and markup tiers the account carries is covered in SWI-007.
3. Roles & Responsibilities
Role | Responsibility |
|---|---|
Parent organization admin (the 3PL) | Decides which accounts children may use, publishes them, and chooses which rate charts each child may see |
Child organization admin (the customer) | Adds the published account into their own organization |
4. When you need this
Use this instruction whenever a child organization cannot see a carrier account that the parent already holds. Typically:
The account exists in the parent organization and works there.
It does not appear in the child organization's Carrier Accounts list.
It also does not appear in the Published Carrier Accounts cards on the child's Carrier Accounts page, which is where a child picks up accounts their parent has offered them.
Other accounts do appear in those cards, so the mechanism itself is working.
Nothing is broken. An account added inside a parent organization stays private to that organization until somebody publishes it, and publishing is the deliberate step this instruction covers.
5. Key concept — "Direct" is not a permission
The Carrier Accounts table has a SOURCE column, and it is the single most commonly misread thing on this screen.
Value | What it actually means |
|---|---|
Direct | The account was added into this organization. It has no parent account above it. |
Published | The account was inherited from a parent organization's published account. Hovering the information icon names the published account it came from. |
SOURCE describes where an account came from. It is not a setting, and there is nothing on it to switch.
An account the parent added itself always reads Direct — before publishing and after. Publishing does not flip it to Published. Published is what the child's own copy reads once they add it. So seeing Direct in the parent is never, by itself, the problem, and changing it is not the fix.
Publishing is a separate record entirely. It lives under Carrier Accounts › Published Carrier Accounts in the parent organization, and creating it is what section 6 does.
6. Procedure — parent organization
Two stages, and both are required. Creating the published record does not, on its own, offer anything to anybody.
6A. Create the published record
Sign in to the parent organization.
Go to Carrier Accounts.
Click Published Carrier Accounts, at the top right of the page.
Click Publish a Carrier Account and choose the account from the drop-down list.
A new card appears, named New Published Carrier Account. At this point no child can see anything yet.
6B. Configure it and switch it on
Click the new card to expand it.
Set the Name. This is what child organizations see, so name it for them — the default is a placeholder, not a name.
Fill in the Public Description. This is visible to everyone, including the child.
Fill in the Private Description if it helps. This is visible only to users in your own organization.
Tick Publish for Children. This is the switch that makes the account available to child organizations. Without it, nothing else in this procedure has any effect.
Under Rate Charts, tick the services — within each tier — that children may use. Only the ticked charts are copied onto the child's account. If one of those tiers is a markup tier, tick the tier it compares against as well, or the markup has nothing to price against. See SWI-007.
Leave Published Channels empty unless you are deliberately offering the account by channel rather than by parent-child relationship. See section 9.
Click Save Changes.
Warning: ticking Publish for Children while ticking no rate charts is the quiet failure mode. The child can add the account, and then holds an account with no rates on it. Set both before you save.
7. Procedure — child organization
Sign in to the child organization.
Go to Carrier Accounts.
Under Published Carrier Accounts, find the card for the account. The name and description are the ones the parent set in step 6B.
Click the card.
In the Add Carrier Account dialog, click Add Carrier Account.
A confirmation appears and the account joins the child's Carrier Accounts list, with SOURCE reading Published.
If that section is not on the page at all, the signed-in user probably lacks full access to Carrier Accounts. See section 9.
8. Verification
In the parent, the published card lists the tiers you selected, and its Child Accounts count rises by one each time a child adds the account.
In the child, the account appears in the Carrier Accounts list with SOURCE reading Published, and hovering the information icon names the published account behind it.
The child's copy carries the services you ticked, and no others.
The child can buy a label on it.
9. Constraints and caveats
Publish for Children reaches direct children only. An organization two levels down does not inherit through the one in the middle — it has to be published again from its own immediate parent.
Both publishing and adding require full access to Carrier Accounts. A user with read-only access does not see the Published Carrier Accounts cards on the child side at all, so a missing section usually means the user needs their access widened rather than anything being wrong with the publishing.
Only ticked rate charts travel. Adding a rate chart to the underlying account later does not push it out to existing children — go back to the published record, tick it, and save again.
Deleting a published record immediately removes every child carrier account created from it, across all channels. The confirmation dialog says so. Treat it as withdrawing a service, not as tidying up.
Published Channels is a second, independent route: a published account is also visible to any organization whose channel is listed there, whether or not it is a child. Leave it empty unless that is what you mean to do.
Renaming the published record changes what every child sees. New Published Carrier Account is not a usable name.
10. Worked example
A reseller UPS account was added inside a 3PL operating as a parent organization. One of its client organizations, a child, could not see it.
Observation | Reading |
|---|---|
The account read SOURCE Direct in the parent | Correct and expected. The parent added it, so it has no parent of its own. Not the cause, and not something to change. |
The account was absent from the child's Carrier Accounts list | Consistent with it never having been published. |
It was also absent from the child's Published Carrier Accounts cards, which did list other accounts | Confirms it. Those other accounts had been published; this one had not. |
The parent's Published Carrier Accounts page held no entry for that account | The diagnosis, in one screen. |
Resolution: the parent published the account per section 6, ticked Publish for Children along with the UPS rate charts they intended to offer, and saved. The child then added it per section 7.