Stopping Supply to a Customer Who Is Not Paying

A customer is well past their terms, the phone calls have stopped working, and you have decided that nobody in the group sells to them again until they pay. By the end of this guide you will have put them on stop in BigLedger, told the order desk and the counter what they will see, closed the gaps the stop does not cover, and protected the stop from the one thing that can quietly remove it. It takes about fifteen minutes. The last section explains how to lift the stop cleanly when the money arrives.

BigLedger calls a stopped customer blacklisted. It is a flag on the customer record, and a person sets it. Nothing in the product sets it for you on a schedule you can rely on (see The one thing that can wipe your stop out below).

Meet GadgetSphere

GadgetSphere Distribution Sdn Bhd (GSD) has a corporate customer, a small systems integrator, who owes RM 64,800 across four invoices. The oldest is 97 days past due. Two promised payment dates have passed. The same customer has an account with the retail company (GS) for accessories and occasionally buys at the GS-KV-01 counter. There is also a draft order at GSD for RM 18,900, which the salesperson keyed yesterday.

You have decided: no more goods, from any GadgetSphere company, until the 97-day invoice is paid.

Before you start

You can edit customers in Customer Maintenance. The stop lives there and nowhere else. The customer editors built into the order and invoice screens do not show it.
The decision is agreed with whoever owns the customer relationship: the sales manager, and for a large account the finance manager. A stop that surprises the salesperson becomes a stop that somebody lifts by lunchtime.
You have checked Chasing Overdue Accounts Step 4 and the debt is not disputed. Stopping supply to a customer who thinks your invoice is wrong usually delays the payment rather than bringing it forward.

Step 1: Put the customer on stop

The outcome: every sales order, sales invoice, cash bill and delivery order for this customer is refused at FINAL, in every company in the group.

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

Scroll to the credit block. There are two dropdowns, each with the values OK and BLACKLISTED:

Credit Limit Status. Use this when the reason is that they owe too much.
Credit Term Status. Use this when the reason is that they pay too late.

Either one stops the customer, and the effect at FINAL is the same. Choose the one that is true, because it changes what people see:

The refusal message names the reason: “Customer is blacklisted due to credit limit”, "…due to overdue credit term", or "…due to credit limit and credit term", each followed by “Transactions are not allowed for this customer.”
With Credit Term Status set, the sales invoice screen also shows a list of the customer’s invoices past their due date when somebody picks them, with how many days old each one is. Whoever picks up the phone to the customer has the overdue invoices in front of them.

For the integrator, the reason is lateness, so set Credit Term Status to BLACKLISTED and save.

Then write the reason in the customer’s Alert Message on the same tab, so the banner says why as well as that:

ON STOP 24 Sep — RM 64,800 overdue, oldest 97 days. Credit control only.

Step 2: Know exactly what the stop refuses, and what it lets through

The outcome: you know where the gaps are before somebody finds them.

Refused at FINAL	Not refused
Sales order	Quotation
Sales invoice	Credit note, debit note, refund note
Cash bill, including at the POS counter	Sales return
Outbound delivery order	Job sheet
	Receipts. You still want their money

Three consequences:

The draft order is not deleted. The RM 18,900 draft order at GSD stays in the listing. Anyone who presses FINAL on it is refused. Tell the salesperson so they do not keep trying, and tell the customer so they are not waiting for goods.
Quotations still go out. A salesperson can keep quoting a stopped customer, and the refusal arrives only when the quotation becomes an order. If your sales team quotes large projects weeks ahead, tell them.
Service work is not stopped. A job sheet is not refused. If you run a repair or installation desk, decide whether a stopped customer’s jobs should be accepted, and tell that desk yourself.

Why it is all or nothing. The stop is a decision a person made to stop trading, so there is no “allow this one document” option. An exception means lifting the stop, finalising, and putting it back. That makes every exception a visible, deliberate act by someone who can edit customers. If you find yourself doing this every week, the customer is not really on stop, and it is better to say so.

Step 3: Tell the people who will meet the refusal

The outcome: nobody at the order desk or the counter is surprised, and nobody gets around the stop by accident.

Where the warning appears, and where it does not:

Sales invoice screen. A warning appears as soon as the customer is picked: “This account is blacklisted. Transactions are not allowed for this customer.” The alert message appears above it.
Sales order screen. Only your alert message appears when the customer is picked. The refusal itself arrives at FINAL.
Delivery order screen. Plan on no warning. The refusal arrives at FINAL.
POS counter. No warning at all. The cashier finds out when the bill is completed.

Send a short note to the order desk, the delivery team and the branch supervisors who serve this customer:

From today, [customer] is on stop across GS, GSO and GSD. Orders, invoices, delivery orders and cash bills will be refused with “Customer is blacklisted…”. Please do not re-key under another customer record. Refer the customer to credit control on 03-xxxx xxxx.

The walk-in gap at the counter. The check applies to the customer picked on the bill. If the cashier sells to the integrator’s staff as a walk-in customer, nothing is refused. For a cash sale that is often fine, because cash is not credit risk, but the purchase then does not appear against their account and the e-invoice does not name them as the buyer. Decide which your policy is, and tell the branches. Either way, the cashier should not be the person making that choice at the till.

The whole group, not just your company. The flag is on the customer record, which every company in the group shares. Stopping the integrator at GSD also stops them at GS and GSO. That is usually what you want. If it is not (for example, retail is allowed to keep selling for cash), the only way to get it is the walk-in rule above.

Step 4: Protect the stop from being wiped out

The outcome: the stop you set is still there next month.

BigLedger has a background job called Blacklist Overdue Customer. It does not run unless somebody puts it on the tenant’s job schedule or runs it by hand, and nothing in the product does either for you. When it does run, it:

Removes every blacklist flag in the tenant, on both dropdowns, for every customer, including every flag a person set by hand.
Re-flags (on Credit Limit Status only) any customer whose balance in any one company is above their default credit limit.

It never re-flags anybody for lateness. The part meant to do that finds no terms to compare against and flags nobody. So after a run, a customer you stopped for lateness under Credit Term Status is back to trading, and nothing tells you.

What to do about it:

Ask your administrator whether the job is scheduled, and who runs it by hand. The answer is almost always nobody. Ask for that to stay true unless credit control agrees otherwise, and make sure anyone who runs it tells you first.
Keep your own list of every customer you put on stop: date, reason, amount, who agreed. This is the credit controller’s stop list, and it existed long before software did. It is also how you check the stops survived: once a month, open each customer on the list and confirm the dropdown still says BLACKLISTED.
If the job is run, re-apply every stop on your list the same day.

Step 5: Lift the stop when the money arrives

The outcome: the customer can trade again, and the documents that were waiting move.

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

Set the dropdown back to OK, clear or rewrite the alert message, save, and take the customer off your stop list with the date and the reason.

Nothing is waiting to happen by itself. The stop never queued anything. It refused FINAL and left the document where it was. So:

The RM 18,900 draft order is still a draft. Somebody must open it, check that the prices and stock are still right, and press FINAL.
Anything that was refused while the customer was on stop and then deleted is gone. It has to be raised again.
Nobody is told the stop has been lifted. Send the same people a one-line note.

Before you lift a stop, decide whether the customer comes back on the same terms. A customer who needed a stop once is a candidate for a lower limit or shorter terms. See Deciding on Credit.

What BigLedger will not do, and who does it instead

It will not…	So…
Stop a customer automatically for being late	You decide and set the stop, from the weekly ageing (Chasing Overdue Accounts)
Keep a record of who set or lifted a stop, and why	Your stop list is that record. Keep it where your finance manager can read it
Warn at the order screen, the delivery order screen or the till before FINAL	You tell the people involved, as in Step 3, and the alert message warns the order desk
Stop quotations, credit notes, returns or job sheets	You tell the teams that raise them
Keep a hand-set stop through a run of the sweep job	You keep the job from running unannounced, and re-apply from your list if it does

Setting a customer INACTIVE instead

The customer record also has a Status of ACTIVE or INACTIVE. An inactive customer disappears from the customer lists on the sales order, sales invoice, delivery order and receipt screens and from the till’s customer list, so nobody can start a new document for them there. It is not a stop at FINAL: the server never looks at the status, so a draft that already names the customer can still be finalised, and so can a document created by an integration or through the API. It is not touched by the sweep job.

Use INACTIVE for a relationship that is over and settled. For a customer who still owes you money, use the stop. Their receipts, credit notes and statements have to keep working, and an inactive customer cannot be picked on the receipt screen, so the payment you are chasing becomes harder to record, not easier.

What success looks like

Three checks, one minute:

Pick the customer on a new sales invoice. The banner shows your alert message and “This account is blacklisted…”. With Credit Term Status set, the overdue-invoice list appears below it.
Press FINAL on a draft order for them (the one in the listing, or a one-line test). It is refused with the reason you chose.
The customer is on your stop list with a date, a reason and the name of whoever agreed.

Common mistakes

Setting the stop and telling nobody. The order desk finds out when FINAL fails, keys the order under another customer record “to get it out”, and the stop now protects nothing. Step 3 is not optional.

Stopping a customer whose invoice is disputed. They are not refusing to pay. They are refusing to pay that. Settle the dispute first, with a credit note if you were wrong, and the stop is often unnecessary.

Running Blacklist Overdue Customer to “refresh” the stops. It removes every stop you set by hand, and re-adds only customers who are over their limit in a single company. Never run it without your stop list in hand.

Expecting the stop to block a quotation. It does not. A salesperson who quotes a stopped customer is setting up a refusal later.

Lifting the stop and expecting orders to flow. Nothing was queued. Every draft waits for a person to finalise it.