Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
One person with powers no admin has, and there are fewer of them than the title suggests. Find out who it is well before the moment you need them.
What only the owner can do
- Appoint and remove billing admins.
- Cancel a product, or the account.
- Manage payment.
- Make account changes such as renaming the subdomain.
- Transfer ownership to somebody else.
- Receive the billing and account notifications.
On a managed account there are no billing admins at all. If you buy Zendesk through us, that is the account you have, and the list above is shorter in practice: appointing billing admins is not something the owner does either, because the account cannot create them. Subscription changes run through us rather than through anybody's Admin Center.
Where billing admins do exist, changing the subscription is not on that list, and that catches people out. Adding seats, buying a product or extending the subscription is something every billing admin can do; it is only cancelling and paying that stay with the owner. Appointing those billing admins, on the other hand, is owner-only, which is why an account whose owner has gone cannot grow the group that could have helped.
One owner, and only one
There is no shared ownership. That makes it a single point of failure, which is manageable if you know about it and painful if you discover it during a renewal.
The failure that catches people
The owner leaves the company and their account is deactivated as part of offboarding. Nobody can now change the plan or the billing, and recovering from that is far more work than transferring ownership would have been.
Transferring ownership belongs in your leaver checklist, next to the mailbox and the laptop.
It should be a role, not a person
Whoever owns the relationship with the tool: an operations manager, an IT lead. Not the person who happened to sign up, who is often no longer involved.
The notifications go to them
Renewals, billing, account warnings. If the owner is somebody who does not read them, those messages are effectively going nowhere.
Check it today
It takes ten seconds and a surprising number of accounts are owned by somebody who left.
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