| Announced on | Rollout on |
| May 14, 2026 | May 14, 2026 |
Zendesk is excited to announce a powerful new way to structure your custom data in Zendesk with parent-child relationships.
This announcement includes the following topics:
What is changing?
In addition to lookup relationship fields, which define one-to-many relationships between records, you can now specify hierarchical relationships using parent-child relationships. Within parent-child relationships, child records are tied to the lifecycle of their parent.
When using parent-child relationships, there is a new custom field type available: roll-up summary fields. These read-only fields are available when a custom object is the parent in a parent-child relationship. You can add a roll-up summary field that automatically calculates data from the associated child records. For example, this could be a total count of items, the sum of costs, or minimum and maximum values.
Some example use cases unlocked by this release include:
Returns
- Parent object: Return
- Child object: Items
- Roll-up summary: COUNT total number of items being returned
Project management
- Parent object: Project
- Child object: Tasks
- Roll-up summary: COUNT of tasks with a status of completed, to track progress
Banking
- Parent object: Account
- Child object: Transactions
- Roll-up summary: MAX of transaction dates, to reflect the most recent transaction date
E-commerce
- Parent object: Order
- Child object: Line items
- Roll-up summary: SUM of the prices for all line items, to show the total cost of the order
For more information, see Defining parent-child relationships for custom objects.
Why is Zendesk making this change?
Zendesk understands that as your data models become more complex, you need better ways to ensure data integrity and gain insights. Parent-child relationships ensure that when a parent record is deleted, the child records are cleaned up, too, to prevent "orphaned" data.
Additionally, roll-up summary fields eliminate the need for manual calculations or external middleware to surface insights on related records. By bringing this logic natively into Zendesk, you can build more efficient workflows.
You can also create many-to-many relationships by creating two parent-child relationships from the child object to the parent object.
What do I need to do?
Parent-child relationships and roll-up summary fields are part of an early access program. To participate, you must turn on the feature. Then you can create parent-child relationships and add roll-up summary fields.
If you have feedback or questions related to this announcement, visit our community forum where we collect and manage customer product feedback. For general assistance with your Zendesk products, contact Zendesk Customer Support.