If you run Checks across many teams, you can now fund all of them from one wallet.
Point each team at a parent team, and billing rolls up. The parent wallet funds everything. The child teams no longer carry a wallet to manage or top up. Finance funds one place and sees the whole picture. And because every charge is attributed to the team that spent it, a single wallet never means a single undifferentiated number. You can always see what each account cost.
For a large organization running a separate team per shipper, that is the difference between funding and reconciling a dozen accounts and funding one. It is worth understanding why we built it the way we did, because the how matters as much as the what.
Power at the edge was the first priority
When we designed Checks, our first priority was putting control in the hands of the people who actually know the account.
The person managing a shipper relationship knows that shipper better than anyone at headquarters. They know which rules matter. They know what good looks like. So we built the product so they can write those rules themselves, in plain language, and act on what needs attention today. No central team translating field knowledge into a configuration weeks later. The expertise lives at the edge, so the control does too.
That works beautifully for a single team. The question was always what happens when a large organization has many.
The wall every field-empowered model hits
Finance.
Large organizations need centralized financial control. One source of funding. One reconciled view of what is being spent and where. That is not bureaucracy, it is how a company of any size stays accountable.
And historically, getting it meant pulling control back to the center. If the center has to own the spend, it ends up owning the tooling, and suddenly the field is back to filing requests. The empowerment you designed in gets quietly undone by the billing model.
We were not willing to make that trade.
Parent billing closes the gap
This is the trade we were not willing to make, so we built the rollup to avoid it entirely.
Finance gets centralized control. One wallet to fund, one view of the whole, auto top up set once on the wallet that actually pays. The teams in the field give up nothing to make that happen. They still write and own their own rules. They still manage their own work. To someone working a shipper account, the billing simply moves out of view. They open their inbox and do the job. The money rolls up to the center. The control stays at the edge.
This is the pattern, not just the feature
Let me be clear about what is and is not new here. Centralized billing across many teams is not a new idea. Companies have pooled budgets and rolled up spend for as long as companies have existed. On its own, parent billing is plumbing, and we are not going to pretend we invented it.
What is new is the pairing. Centralized finance and field empowerment are usually treated as a tradeoff. More of one means less of the other. The interesting thing is not that we centralized the billing. It is that we did it without taking control away from the people in the field.
That is the part we think is worth talking about. AI lets you put capability where the knowledge is, and a well-designed system lets the organization keep the control it needs without reaching back to take that capability away. Parent billing is proof of that commitment. It will not be the last.
If you run multiple teams in Checks, this is live now. Open the settings page for one of the accounts you want to link, and you will see a link option in the billing section. You will need to be an owner on both accounts to link them. The rest takes care of itself.
