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Bectran Product Team
I
January 21, 2026
7 minutes to read
When a sales team lands a major enterprise account, the immediate reaction is usually celebration. Winning a customer with 20, 50, or 100 locations is a significant revenue event. However, that excitement often hits a wall the moment the credit application is sent.
For a small business, filling out a credit application is a standard step. For a large enterprise with dozens of subsidiaries or ship-to locations, a standard digital form is an administrative burden they frequently reject. They have the purchasing power to demand a better process, and they know it.
The conflict arises because the credit department needs data to assess risk and structure the account in the ERP, but the customer refuses to perform manual data entry for every single location. This standoff delays revenue, frustrates the new customer, and forces the credit team to scramble for a workaround.
Large customers frequently refuse to engage with standard onboarding workflows if those workflows appear repetitive or tedious. The expectation for B2B trade is shifting toward the consumer standard: fast, intelligent, and low-effort.
Multi-location buyers routinely refuse to complete separate applications for each branch or manually list them out in rigid forms. Customers with 15-20+ locations will not fill out individual forms for each site. This is not a negotiation tactic. It is a refusal to perform administrative labor that the customer believes the supplier should handle.
Even when customers do not outright refuse, the process damages the relationship. If a customer has already provided master data or believes their size warrants a white-glove setup, asking for basic details again creates immediate friction.
Customers express frustration when asked to provide information they feel is unnecessary or redundant. They believe the supplier should already know this information or have these processes streamlined. When the system forces a manual request, it signals to the customer that the supplier's internal processes are rigid or disorganized.
The issue usually stems from a misalignment between how enterprise customers operate and how credit systems are architected.
Many ERPs and legacy credit platforms treat a customer as a single entity with a billing and shipping address. They struggle to handle complex parent-child relationships in which one parent entity holds the credit limit while 50 child entities place orders.
To compensate for this system limitation, credit teams often ask customers to complete separate applications for each location to generate the necessary unique IDs in the ERP. The customer sees this as the supplier exporting their own technical debt onto the buyer.
Traditional credit risk workflows prioritize form over substance. The goal is often to get the application signed rather than to obtain the data needed to assess risk.
For a massive public company, the risk assessment does not rely on a trade reference provided in a web form. The risk data comes from audited financials and credit bureau reports. However, the workflow often remains hard-coded to require the form completion before the account setup can begin. This prioritizes process compliance over business reality.
Even when a customer sends a spreadsheet of locations (a store list), many credit departments lack the tools to import it directly into their system. A credit analyst must sit down and manually type 50 addresses into the ERP or the credit platform. This slows down the time-to-first-order and introduces human error.
To solve this, credit teams must shift from a location-based onboarding process to a relationship-based process. This involves treating the customer as a hierarchy rather than a list of unrelated entities.
The most effective way to onboard a multi-location enterprise is to establish a clear Parent-Child structure from the outset.
The Parent (Master) Layer:
The Child (Location) Layer:
By structuring the data this way, you only need the customer to sign one document. The subsequent locations are operational details, not credit risk events.
When a customer refuses to fill out a form for 20 locations, the solution is to accept what they will give you: a spreadsheet.
Modern onboarding workflows should allow the credit team (or the customer) to upload a CSV file containing all ship-to locations. The system should then:
This removes the refusal objection because the customer does not have to fill anything out. They simply email a file they already have.
A major source of friction is asking a local manager to sign a credit application for a branch when they do not have the legal authority to bind the parent company.
The framework must distinguish between Account Setup (operational) and Credit Application (legal/financial). You can send a simple form to a branch manager to collect accurate shipping hours and contact emails without asking them to agree to terms and conditions or provide financial statements. This reduces confusion and speeds up the process.
Solving the multi-location onboarding problem has strategic implications for the finance team and the wider business.
Every day a new location sits in the pending setup queue is a day that location cannot place an order. For a customer with 50 locations, a one-week delay in onboarding represents a significant loss of transaction volume. Streamlining this process directly improves Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) by ensuring billing data is set up correctly from the start, preventing disputes later.
When customers are onboarded as disjointed, individual accounts due to system limitations, the credit manager loses visibility into total exposure. If one branch goes delinquent, it might not trigger a hold on the other 49 branches because the system does not know they are related.
A proper hierarchy ensures that risk is aggregated. If the parent company's credit rating drops, the credit manager can immediately see the impact across the entire portfolio.
In competitive markets, ease of doing business is a deciding factor. If a competitor requires a week of paperwork to open an account, and your team can do it in an afternoon with a single email and a spreadsheet upload, you become the preferred vendor. Large enterprises value efficiency. Aligning your onboarding process with their expectations signals that your company is sophisticated enough to handle their business.
The refusal of large customers to complete standard forms is a signal that the standard process is broken for that segment. Credit managers must have the flexibility to offer different paths for different customer types: a digital wizard for small businesses, and a high-touch, bulk-upload workflow for enterprises.
To address this friction, review your current capabilities:
By respecting the customer's time and internal structure, you remove the barrier to entry and start the relationship on a foundation of efficiency rather than frustration.
Enterprise customers refusing to complete forms for 20+ locations? Bectran's parent-child account structure allows a single credit application for the master entity, bulk CSV uploads for all ship-to locations, automatic address validation and account creation, and inherited credit terms across the hierarchy—eliminating manual data entry for multi-location onboarding. See how enterprise onboarding works.
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