Account provisioning sequence
Multi-system flow for setting up new customer accounts.
Most SaaS products have a magic moment: a customer signs up and within seconds their entire account is provisioned across billing systems, identity management, feature flags, and data storage. But that second of magic masks a choreographed dance across five or more systems. This template shows the messages: subscription creation, tenant setup, workspace initialization, and the invite that lets the first admin log in to a fully ready account.
Sequence diagrams make these integrations visible by showing which system sends each message and when, so you can see where delays happen or where a timeout in one path cascades into a failed provisioning.
When to use this template
- Integration planning — decide which systems must provision synchronously (billing, identity) and which can be asynchronous (email, analytics, backups).
- Onboarding SLA documentation — show customers exactly how long provisioning takes and which systems can cause delays.
- Incident postmortems — when provisioning fails for a customer, use this diagram to trace which message exchange broke and why.
How to adapt it
Expand the participants to include your actual systems. Common extensions:
- Add a database provisioning step after the app creates the subscription, showing the DB service creating a new tenant schema.
- Insert an email notification to the sales rep once provisioning completes, so they know to follow up.
- Add a webhook to your onboarding platform (like Pendo or Appcues) so the new admin sees guided tours on their first login.
Visual edits regenerate clean code, so even complex multi-system provisioning stays easy to understand and maintain.
Mermaid code
Copy it anywhere Mermaid is supported — GitHub, Notion, or your docs.
sequenceDiagram
actor Admin
participant App as SaaS App
participant Billing
participant IdP as Identity Provider
participant Email
Admin->>App: Create new account
App->>Billing: Provision subscription
Billing-->>App: Subscription created
App->>IdP: Create tenant directory
IdP-->>App: Directory provisioned
App->>IdP: Invite first admin
IdP->>Email: Send invite link
Email-->>IdP: Sent
Admin->>IdP: Accept invite
IdP->>App: Set up workspace
App-->>Admin: Account ready
Frequently asked questions
- What does account provisioning mean?
- Provisioning is the automated process of setting up all the systems and resources a new customer needs: creating their subscription record, setting up their database, creating their identity directory, sending invitations to team members, and configuring integrations. It turns a sales close into a working account in minutes.
- Why use a sequence diagram for provisioning instead of a flowchart?
- Flowcharts show decisions and branches. Sequence diagrams show which systems talk to each other and in what order. Provisioning is about choreography — five systems exchanging messages synchronously and asynchronously — which sequence diagrams make crystal clear.
- What can go wrong during provisioning that I should handle?
- Billing can reject the subscription (payment issues, invalid plan). The identity provider can reject the tenant creation (quota or naming conflict). Email delivery can fail. One failure should roll back the others. This diagram is the happy path — extend it to show compensating transactions or alerts when any step fails.
- How do I extend this for team members and workspace settings?
- Add new participants for each system that needs configuration — e.g., a search index, a notification service, or a feature-flag provider. For each one, insert a message from App to that system, then add a participant to the invite flow so team members land in a fully configured workspace. Visual edits regenerate the code, so complex multi-system setups stay maintainable.