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Decentralized Billing: Supporting Personal Romance and Good Business Practice
My husband Aaron, a culinary instructor, took a trip to Korea to study Korean cuisine this past summer. Aaron had planned a wonderful surprise for me while he was away. He coordinated with my closest girl friends and my mother to arrange for a scavenger hunt that would lead me to a beautiful antique ring. And it all would have worked exactly according to plan, had it not been for one minor detail – I noticed a rather large debit transaction to a jewelry store post to our bank account.
The situation spurred me to consider how we could rearrange our finances to allow for increased independence (and future surprises!). It dawned on me that this is precisely the appeal of decentralized billing for commercial customers. Decentralized billing allows for one customer to segment a single account into various “children” to accommodate different offices, regions, departments, and more. As a result, each child account can access a particular portion of the customer account’s credit line, receive individual bills for the purchases their specific child account makes, and even pay for those bills independent from other children accounts.
In the commercial trucking industry, and many other industries as well, this decentralized billing is in high demand. Fleets request decentralized billing in order to allocate larger portions of their credit lines to groups of drivers who have longer hauls than local teams, for instance, or to enable regional offices to review, approve and ultimately pay for purchases that employees within their jurisdiction make.
In my humble opinion, a commercial accounts program without decentralized billing is a bit like a truck without a trailer. It may drive like a charm, but it won’t allow you to realize the full potential of your investment. And as for my connecting a gift from my husband to decentralized billing? Well, I guess no one will accuse me of being a romantic on this one.
