Feature Spotlight
Parent-Child Billing: Streamline Complex Billing Relationships with Maple
Modern businesses often operate across multiple entities, departments, or locations, each with their own subscriptions and billing needs. From enterprise organizations with regional offices to franchise networks and reseller partnerships, managing billing relationships can quickly become complex.
Maple's parent-child billing feature provides a comprehensive solution for managing hierarchical billing relationships, enabling organizations to maintain centralized control while preserving the flexibility needed for diverse business structures.
What is Parent-Child Billing?
Parent-child billing establishes hierarchical relationships between customer accounts, allowing organizations to manage billing responsibilities across multiple entities. This feature is particularly valuable for businesses that need to handle complex organizational structures while maintaining billing efficiency and visibility.
With Maple's parent-child billing, you can enable grandparent, parent, and child relationships that mirror actual organizational structures. Each level can have different billing and payment responsibilities, providing the flexibility to match your business model.
Key Use Cases
Parent-child billing addresses several common business scenarios where traditional flat billing structures fall short:
Enterprise Organizations
Large companies with multiple departments, business units, or regional offices can centralize billing while maintaining departmental autonomy. For example, a university's IT department may pay for software licenses across all departments, while each department manages their own subscriptions and usage.
Franchise Networks
Franchise companies can maintain visibility into franchisee spending while allowing individual locations to manage their own subscriptions. This enables corporate oversight without micromanaging local operations.
Reseller Partnerships
Software providers can bill their reseller partners for multiple deployments while maintaining separate billing relationships with end customers. This supports complex channel partnerships and multi-tier distribution models.
Billing Flexibility Options
Maple's parent-child billing supports three distinct billing modes, allowing you to configure relationships that match your specific business needs:
Centralized Billing
Child accounts defer all payment responsibilities to their parent account. This model is ideal when a central entity manages all financial obligations, such as a corporate IT department paying for software across all business units.
Distributed Billing
Each child account manages their own payment methods while providing visibility to the parent account. This approach works well for franchise networks where individual locations maintain financial independence while corporate maintains oversight.
Mixed Mode
Parent accounts can configure different billing arrangements for different child accounts within the same hierarchy. This provides maximum flexibility for complex organizational structures where some entities require centralized billing while others need distributed control.
Key Features and Benefits
- Rollup Invoicing: Consolidate invoices from multiple child accounts into single parent invoices, reducing administrative overhead and simplifying payment processing.
- Multi-Currency Support: Handle international organizations with separate invoices per currency while maintaining consolidated reporting.
- Flexible Tax Handling: Automatically determine taxes based on child and parent jurisdictions, ensuring compliance across different geographic locations.
- Centralized Reporting: View consolidated revenue metrics and analytics across all child accounts from the parent level, providing complete organizational visibility.
- API Management: Configure and manage hierarchical relationships programmatically through Maple's comprehensive API, enabling automated setup and maintenance.
- Override Capabilities: Allow parent accounts to override payment methods at the subscription level, providing granular control when needed.
Real-World Impact
Adapt API, a document processing and notifications automation platform, uses Maple's parent-child billing to streamline how they bill their enterprise customers. With multiple enterprise clients who have complex organizational structures, Adapt API needed a billing solution that could handle parent-child relationships while maintaining detailed visibility into usage and spending patterns.
Through Maple's parent-child billing, Adapt API can now consolidate invoices for their enterprise customers while providing granular visibility into usage across different departments, business units, and geographic locations. This has enabled them to offer more flexible billing arrangements and reduce administrative overhead for both their team and their customers.
"Maple's parent-child billing has been a game-changer for how we serve our enterprise customers. We can now offer consolidated billing while maintaining the granular control our customers need. It has drastically reduced our support tickets and made our enterprise sales process much smoother."
Getting Started
Parent-child billing is available for organizations that need to manage complex billing relationships. The feature integrates seamlessly with Maple's existing subscription management, invoicing, and payment processing capabilities, providing a unified solution for hierarchical billing needs.
Whether you're managing billing for a multi-entity enterprise, franchise network, or reseller partnership, Maple's parent-child billing feature provides the flexibility and control you need to streamline your billing operations while maintaining the organizational structure that works best for your business.