In a corporate card program, multiple accounts draw from a common credit pool. One account acts as a centralizer or centralizing account, and the other accounts are child accounts of the centralizer or of other child accounts. Purchases are authorized on the child accounts but charged to the centralizer account, which is where the statements are generated. Payments are made to the centralizer.

In the most common use case, a company's departments or subsidiaries would be the child accounts of the centralizer account, and individual cardholders would have grandchild accounts. Employees and subsidiary accounts make purchases against the shared pool and receive refunds or credit vouchers back into it. Every purchase consolidates onto the centralizer's own statement, and the centralizer settles it as a single bill, which restores the pool.

Creating an account hierarchy with a shared credit limit

The Pismo platform enables 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 corporate card programs. For more information about account hierarchies, refer to the Accounts guide.

To create an account hierarchy with a shared credit limit for a corporate card program, follow these steps.

1. Use the Create balance configuration endpoint to create a balance configuration. Include a global_configs object with impact_parent_accounts set to true. For more information about balance configurations, refer to the Balance configurations overview guide.
2. Use the Update account endpoint to designate one of the accounts as the centralizer account. You do this by setting the centralizer field to true.
3. Use the Update account endpoint to set the parent_account_id of each the child accounts to the account ID of the account that is above it in the hierarchy. For accounts that are just below the centralizer, this would be the account ID of the centralizer. Make sure that you also set thecentralizer field to false for all child accounts.

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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.