Credit Limits and Terms: Attach Them

Attach credit terms and limits to customers and suppliers

Steps 3 to 5 of setting up credit limits and payment terms: attach the terms and limits you built to the customers and suppliers who have them. It follows Steps 1 and 2, where you built the library of definitions. The running example is GadgetSphere Distribution (GSD), whose corporate buyers are almost all on thirty days with limits from RM 20,000 to RM 500,000; the IT reseller below gets NET30 and LIMIT-150K (Meet GadgetSphere).

Step 3: attach a term and a limit to a customer.
Step 4: set the defaults on the customer’s Main tab.
Step 5: do the same for suppliers, knowing it is a record and not a control.

Step 3: Attach a term and a limit to a customer

Master Data > Customer Maintenance > Customer Listing > (the customer) > Credit Term and Limit

The outcome: this customer’s invoices date themselves, and the customer appears on the credit-control screens with a ceiling beside their name.

The tab shows the terms and limits already attached to this customer. The + button opens a picker with a Select Mode / Create Mode toggle:

Select Mode — choose one of the definitions you built in Steps 1 and 2. This is what you want almost every time.
Create Mode — define a brand-new term or limit inline, without leaving the customer. Convenient, and the reason tenants end up with 180 credit terms. Use it only when you genuinely have a one-off.

Attach one term and one limit. For our IT reseller: NET30 and LIMIT-150K.

Attach exactly one of each, and keep the old ones out of the way. When a customer has two active credit limits, different screens pick different ones — the reports take whichever row was saved most recently, and the Blacklist Overdue Customer job takes the one the Default Credit Limit picker points at (Step 4), unless the customer has a company-level limit for that company, which it prefers. They will disagree, silently, and the disagreement surfaces months later as “why is this customer blacklisted when the report says they are inside their limit”. If you are changing a customer’s limit, set the old assignment to INACTIVE or remove it rather than leaving both.

Step 4: Set the defaults on the customer’s Main tab

Master Data > Customer Maintenance > Customer Listing > (the customer) > Main

The outcome: the pointers that the credit sweep actually reads.

Scroll the Main tab to the credit block. There are four controls:

Default Credit Limit — a picker listing the limits attached to this customer.
Default Credit Term — the same for terms.
Credit Limit Status — two values, OK and BLACKLISTED.
Credit Term Status — the same two values.

Set both pickers. This is the step people skip, because Step 3 already looks like it finished the job, and it is the step that matters most: the credit sweep finds a customer’s limit through the Default Credit Limit pointer, unless the customer has a company-level limit for that company (Company Linking > the company > Credit Limits). A customer with a limit on the Credit Term and Limit tab, an empty Default picker and no company-level limit is invisible to it.

A customer created through this applet can fill these in for you: if your administrator has set Settings > Default Selection > Default Credit Term and Default Credit Limit, a brand-new customer gets the assignment made and both pointers set automatically. That only happens while the record is still being created — it will never retro-fit a customer who already exists, and it does not happen at all to customers created in the Entity Maintenance applet or through the API.

Leave both status dropdowns at OK. New customers are created that way. What they are for is covered in What the numbers actually drive.

Step 5: Do the same for suppliers, knowing it is a record and not a control

Master Data > Supplier > Credit Term Listing / Credit Limit Listing, then the supplier’s Credit Term and Limit tab

The purchase side is a mirror image: the same two listings, the same assignment tab, the same six numbers. A purchase invoice offers the supplier’s terms to pick, but it keeps no due date: the purchase invoice applet works the date out and has nowhere to put it, so you age payables from the invoice date and the terms yourself.

The difference is that on the purchase side nothing acts on the credit limit at all. There is no sweep, no flag and no check. A supplier credit limit in BigLedger is a note to yourself about what the supplier agreed to give you. That is still worth recording — it is what your buyers look at — but do not build a process on the assumption that BigLedger will stop a purchase order.

The supplier form has one field the customer form does not: Credit Term Logic, offering None or End of Month. Choosing End of Month pre-fills Set Day 1, Add Month 2 and Add Day −1. Read the warning in Step 1 before relying on it, and work one example by hand, because no purchase invoice will show you the date it produces. The word you pick is copied onto the supplier’s assignment row when you assign the term, and is then carried for reference only — no due-date arithmetic anywhere reads it. What produces the date is the six numbers it pre-filled.

See Supplier for the full field reference.

What success looks like for this part

The customer’s Credit Term and Limit tab holds exactly one active term and one active limit, the Main tab’s Default Credit Limit and Default Credit Term both show a value, and both status dropdowns read OK. Each supplier you set up has the term and the limit it agreed on its own Credit Term and Limit tab. The whole setup’s success check adds the due-date test on a real invoice; the rest of the common mistakes are on the front page.

Common mistakes in this part

The setup’s common mistakes are kept together on the front page. For these steps, read first the ones about leaving two credit limits on one customer, editing a definition and expecting it to propagate, and setting a blacklist by hand.

Next: Step 6, load them in bulk, if you have hundreds. If you do not, read What the numbers actually drive.