# Model Business Units

To take full advantage of B2B capabilities, model your customers' buyer organizations within commercetools. Use [Business Units](/api/associates-overview.md#business-unit) to model your customers' companies and divisions. You can then assign specific [Associate Roles](/api/projects/associate-roles.md) to the employees involved in purchasing your products to control their permissions within a Business Unit.

Business Units can be organized hierarchically up to 5 levels deep. The company is the top-level unit and divisions are represented as child units.

Divisions can inherit Stores, including product assortments and prices, and Associates and their roles from parent divisions or the company. This simplifies the setup and administration of large companies.

Many B2B sellers offer [company-specific products and pricing](/api/customers-overview.md#customer-specific-products-prices-and-discounts) to their customers. You can set this up by linking Business Units to dedicated Stores, Product Selections, and Channels.

To model buyer organizations yourself, grant administrators Merchant Center roles to create and manage companies and their associates. To let customers model their own structure and roles with self-service capabilities, use the commercetools commerce APIs. The [Associate endpoints](/api/associates-overview.md#through-the-associate-endpoint) allow you to validate that an Associate has the permissions to view, change, or delete Business Units or Associates.

## Related pages

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