> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://www.plain.com/docs/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Accounts

> Accounts are how you group the customers you support into the organizations that they belong to.

Accounts can be created from multiple sources:

1. Automatically from their contact email address domain.
2. Directly in the Plain UI
3. From the existing organizational entities in your CRM using one of our [CRM integrations](https://www.plain.com/docs/product/integrations/crm.md)
4. Through Plain's API

Customers can belong to multiple accounts.

<Snippet file="graphql/sdk-note.mdx" />

When created via the API, accounts can be structured however you choose. For example, if you organized customers in a team in your product. You could then create one account per team. Each account has an externalId parameter that you can use to map the account back to an entity in your database.

For advanced integrations with Plain you can specify an account when creating a thread. This is useful when building a support portal in your product as it allows you to fetch threads specific to a team in your product.

Additionally [tiers and SLAs](https://www.plain.com/docs/product/platform/tiers.md) can be associated with an account.


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