A Commercial cards program enables you to manage spending across multiple accounts using a shared credit structure. Instead of assigning independent limits to individual cardholders, you create hierarchical account structures that share and distribute available credit across departments, teams, or employees. This provides centralized spending controls, consolidated billing, and shared limit management across an organization's account hierarchy.

Commercial cards is a cross-product capability that you can use across multiple transaction processing flows. Depending on the flow, the Pismo platform applies the same shared-limit hierarchy and authorization principles while adapting processing to the specific channel and transaction type. For more information about transaction processing flows, refer to the Transaction processing flows guide.

Account hierarchy

The Pismo platform lets you to organize a program's accounts in a parent-child hierarchy. This is a general platform feature—that is, it's not specific to Commercial cards. For more information about account hierarchies, refer to the Accounts guide.

In a Commercial cards program, each account in the hierarchy can participate in a shared limit structure, enabling you to control spending activity at multiple levels. Shared limits allow multiple accounts to consume credit from the same limit structure.

Centralizing account

In the account hierarchy for a Commercial cards program, you designate one account as the centralizer or centralizing account.

The centralizing account is responsible for:

• Consolidating transactions
• Receiving payments
• Generating statements
• Supporting accounting processes

This lets you manage spending and billing from a single account.

🚧

You should not designate more than one account in a hierarchy as a centralizer. The Pismo platform does not prevent you from doing so, but this can lead to unpredictable behavior.

Authorization

The Pismo platform validates available credit across the account hierarchy during a transaction authorization. It approves a transaction only if all required accounts meet the necessary validation and limit requirements.

Authorization events might include information about the accounts impacted by the transaction, providing visibility into how shared limits are consumed.

Transactions and statements

The Pismo platform records transactions in the centralizing account, enabling consolidated billing and reporting. Transaction records also identify the original account that initiated the purchase.

Your organization benefits from:

• Centralized statements
• Consolidated invoice management
• Simplified reconciliation
• Visibility across departments and users

Payments

The Pismo platform processes payments through the centralizing account. When it receives a payment, limit restoration should follow the configured payment and discharge process, helping maintain consistency across the shared limit hierarchy.

You must enable this behavior by setting authorization.update_balance_after_discharge=true in the acceptance configuration associated with the invoice-payment processing code. For example, you could do this at the organization level using the Create org configuration or Update org configuration endpoints. For more information about payment configuration, refer to the Payment methods configurations overview guide.

Common use cases for Commercial cards

The following are some of the most common use cases for Commercial cards.

• Corporate card programs: Provide employees with access to a shared company credit facility while maintaining centralized control over spending.
• Fleet card programs: Manage spending across vehicles, drivers, and operational units using a shared limit structure.
• Department-based budgeting: Allocate spending capacity to departments while enforcing organization-wide credit controls.