Credit Sales Workflow

A corporate customer wants to buy on account: goods now, payment in thirty days. This guide is for whoever sets up credit customers and invoices them, usually sales admin or the credit controller. By the end of this guide you will have set that customer up, invoiced them, and put yourself in a position to know — on any given morning — exactly who owes you what and for how long. Setting up a customer takes five minutes. Knowing what BigLedger will and will not do to protect you takes the ten minutes it takes to read this page, and it is the more valuable half.

Meet GadgetSphere

GadgetSphere Sdn Bhd’s distribution arm sells to corporate buyers on account. Today’s customer is an IT reseller who orders in batches of twenty to forty units, several times a month. Their terms are Net 30 and their credit limit is RM 150,000. This month’s order is 24 flagship smartphones at RM 3,800: RM 91,200 net, RM 5,472 SST at 6%, RM 96,672.

Selling on account, at a glance

BigLedger does not check a credit limit when you finalise a sale unless the optional check is on, and its blacklist comes from a job that may never run. Read the section after this list before you rely on any limit.

Set the customer up for credit (Step 1).
Check the exposure yourself before you commit (Step 2).
Raise the order (Step 3), then invoice it (Step 4).
Know what you are owed, every morning (Step 5).
Take the payment and apply it to the invoice (Step 6).
Change the amount owed with a credit note, or with a sales return when goods come back (Step 7).

The work runs across two pages: Steps 1 and 2 are on this one, and Steps 3 to 7 are on Invoice and Collect.

    flowchart LR
  C["Customer record<br/>terms · limit · AR type"] -->|"credit terms"| SO["Sales Order<br/>SAVE, then FINAL"]
  SO -->|"knock off"| SI["<b>Sales Invoice</b><br/><b>stock out · journal · receivable</b>"]
  SI --> DR["Debtor Report<br/>the ageing"]
  RV["Receipt Voucher<br/>Settlement line"] -->|"Contra tab"| SI
  SI -.->|"overbilled or discount"| CN["Sales Credit Note<br/>reduces the receivable"]
  SI -.->|"goods sent back"| SR["Sales Return<br/>receivable down · stock back in"]

Read this first: what credit control in BigLedger actually is

Four facts decide how much a credit limit protects you. Each is explained in full on its own page, and the steps below assume you know them.

No limit is checked at FINAL unless the one optional check is on. It is off unless somebody turned it on, and it covers only the Sales Order and Sales Invoice screens, counting one company. With it off, the RM 96,672 order above saves, finalises, posts and ships for a customer who already owes RM 140,000 against a RM 150,000 limit, without a warning. What the check counts, and the group exposure it misses: Deciding on Credit.
What stops a customer is a blacklist flag, and it is retrospective and all-or-nothing. A blacklisted customer is refused at FINAL on sales orders, sales invoices, cash bills and outbound delivery orders, for RM 96,672 or for a RM 39 cable, with no override short of clearing the flag. The order that takes a customer over the limit still goes through; the block arrives on the next one, once the Blacklist Overdue Customer sweep has run.
Schedule the sweep. It runs only where somebody gave it a clock, and a daily one is the recommended setup. Its first act on every run is to clear every flag in the tenant, hand-set ones included, so whoever keeps the stop list re-applies hand-set stops after each run, before trading opens. Setting the customer INACTIVE does not refuse anything at FINAL either. Who keeps a stop in place, and how: Stopping Supply to a Customer. Which limit and which term the sweep reads, and why a late customer is refused with the credit limit message: What a credit limit actually drives.
Nothing approves a sale. The approval engine covers purchase orders, purchase requisitions and stock requisitions only, and the sales order’s Approval menu releases below-price lines without gating FINAL. A large credit sale is signed off by whoever holds the FINAL permission on the invoice (Sales core concepts §4).

Until you have seen the sweep’s schedule on your tenant, treat every check in this section as your sales team’s job, not BigLedger’s.

Step 1: Set the customer up for credit

Master Data > Customer Maintenance > (the customer) > credit fields

The outcome: a customer record that tells everyone what the agreed deal is.

Three things to set:

Credit terms — Net 30 here. This is what the invoice uses to work out the due date. Attach the term on the Credit Term and Limit tab, then point Default Credit Term at it on the Main tab.
Credit limit — RM 150,000. Same two steps: attach it, then set Default Credit Limit. Remember what this does: it feeds the sweep, and it does not block anything by itself. Setting up terms and limits properly, once, for every customer is its own job — see Credit Limits and Payment Terms.
AR type — trade or non-trade. This decides which receivable account the invoice posts to: DEBTOR-TRADE-RETAIL for an ordinary customer, a non-trade account for staff advances, intercompany balances and the like. Get it wrong and the balance lands in the wrong place on the balance sheet.

While you are here, set the billing and delivery addresses properly. The invoice copies them, and on an e-Invoice the buyer details have to be right before submission.

Step 2: Check the exposure yourself, before you commit

Sales > Sales Order (Internal) > Create > Main Details

The outcome: a decision made by a person, because the system is not going to make it for you.

When you create the order, the header shows the customer’s credit terms and which credit limit the order carries. It does not show how much of that limit is left. No sales order or sales invoice screen shows an available-credit figure while you key the document. The invoice screen shows an Outstanding Balance Alert banner once a customer is already past their limit. If customers sign in to your online store and buy on account, the Available Credit Limit their store shows is the same figure the FINAL check uses, for the store’s company, and the store will not take an order bigger than it on account. The “… available out of …” bar your staff see on a store account in the back office, and what an integration may be given, are calculated a different way and cannot stop anything. Deciding on Credit, Step 3, sets the two calculations side by side and says which to trust.

So the decision is yours, made from the Debtor Report before the order is finalised. You know it was made when the order’s Remarks say who checked the customer’s position, and on what date. If the customer’s room is thin, this is the moment to ask for a deposit, shorten the terms, or split the order. Once you press FINAL nothing else is going to ask the question.

For a broader view before a big order, open the Debtor Report Applet and look at the customer’s ageing — RM 140,000 spread across thirty days is a different conversation from RM 140,000 that is ninety days old.

Next: raise the order, invoice it and collect the payment.

What success looks like

Open the invoice’s ARAP tab. Once the receipt is contra’d in full, Outstanding reads 0.00. Doc Open Amount still reads the invoice total, RM 96,672.00, and Contra equals it with the opposite sign. Settlement reads 0.00 unless payment was taken on the invoice itself, because it counts only that. If Doc Open Amount has not moved, nothing is wrong: Outstanding is the figure that answers whether the invoice is paid.
Run the Debtor Report for this customer. The invoice has left the ageing.
Open the customer’s Statement of Account. Invoice, receipt and any credit note are all there, in order, and the closing balance is what you believe it to be.
Ask one question out loud: who puts a customer on stop here? The blacklist is a flag a person sets, and the sweep that can set it runs only where somebody scheduled it. If nobody can name the person, that is your real credit-control gap, and it is a five-minute conversation to close.

Common mistakes

Believing the credit limit stops anything. It does not, at the moment of sale, unless the optional check on the order and invoice screens is on, and even then it counts one company only. The number of businesses that have discovered this the month after a customer went under is the reason this guide leads with it.

Treating a blacklist as a system error. It is the system doing the one thing it does. Clear the arrears, then clear the flag — do not sell to the customer under a second entity record.

Raising a credit note for returned goods. The money comes off and the stock never comes back. Weeks later the physical count is short and nobody can explain it. Goods coming back always means a Sales Return.

Finalising receipts without contra. Money banked, invoice still overdue, customer chased anyway. Check the invoice’s Outstanding every time.

Leaving the AR type wrong. A staff advance posted to trade debtors inflates your receivables and distorts the ageing. Set it on the customer record once, properly.

Waiting for an approval that is never coming. There is no sales approval engine. If a large credit sale needs a second pair of eyes, build that into who can press FINAL, and into a habit of checking the ageing first — not into a configuration screen that does not exist for this document type.