Credit and collections overview

You can manage credit limits for your customers and perform collection activities when they become necessary.

Credit management

Customer credit management lets you manage credit limits and control the flow of sales orders through the posting process, based on credit rules that you create.

The credit management process can include any of the following steps:

• Update credit attributes for customers to provide additional information about their credit worthiness.
• Create credit limits for customers by using credit limit adjustments.
• Create temporary credit limits for customers by using credit limit adjustments. In this way, you can temporarily increase or decrease customer credit limits, based on business requirements.
• Add information that can affect the credit limit, such as information about insurance and guarantees.
• Create customer credit groups that link customers together so that they share a single credit limit.
• Assign risk scores to customers, and then use the scores to automatically generate credit limits for those customers through credit limit adjustments.
• Create blocking rules that put an order on hold during one or more posting processes, based on factors such as risk, payment terms, credit limits, overdue amounts, and the percentage of the credit limit that has been used.
• Manage a list of sales orders that are on hold, review the reasons for the hold, and mitigate issues.
• Release sales orders so that they continue through the posting process.
• Set up a workflow to manage the approval of credit limit changes and sales order releases.

Collections management

The Collections page provides a centralized view where accounts receivable collections information is managed. Collections managers can use this centralized view to manage collections. Collections agents can begin the collections process either from customer lists that are generated by using predefined collection criteria or from the Customers page.

Before you start to set up or work with collections, you should understand the following concepts:

• Customer aging snapshots contain aged balance information at a specific point in time.
• Collections customer pools help you organize your work.
• Collections agents can have their own customer pools.
• List pages organize collections customers, activities, and cases.
• All collections information for a customer is on one page, and you can take action from that page.
• Interest and fees can be waived, reinstated, or reversed in one step.
• Write-off transactions can be created in one step.
• Not sufficient funds (NSF) payments can be processed in one step.

For descriptions of these concepts, see Collections management key concepts.

Additional resources

Customer credit management parameters setup

Customer credit management setup information

Add credit management information for a customer

Customer credit groups

Customer credit limit adjustments

Credit holds for sales orders

Customer credit management periodic tasks