Xebra's credit management features were designed to help you avoid placing orders to vendors for customers that haven't paid for their previous orders. Xebra does this by allowing you to define some simple rules for determining when an invoice is too far past due, letting you modify these rules on a per customer basis if some of your customers deserve special consideration, and setting flags on jobs and customers that alert order entry operators that there is a credit problem.
General settings for the Credit Management features are in the Credit Management Setup window. Within this window, you can enable or disable the credit checking features.
Credit Checking occurs during new job entry after the operator presses the OK button on the New Job dialog. Credit checking only occurs if the various credit status flags on the customer billing record don't already place the job on hold or flag it for prepayment required. During credit checking, Xebra calculates the credit exposure (credit exposure=balance of open invoices + balance of open orders) for the customer and determines whether the customer has any past due invoices. If the credit exposure is greater than or equal to the customer's credit limit, or the customer has one or more past due invoices, the customer fails the credit check and a caution flag on the customer is set.
The Customer Credit Summary window allows you to view credit related information about a customer and make settings to control how the account should be handled.
1. Credit limit is a value that you can set for each customer.
2. Exposure is a value calculated by adding the total balance of open invoices to the total balance of open orders.
3. If this value is zero, the global value in credit management setup is used.
4. Credit checking can be disabled for an individual customer.
5. If the 'Credit hold' flag is set for a customer and a new job is created for the customer, the new job is placed on hold and the operator entering the job will see a message box that says, "Customer (billing code) (billing name) is on credit hold." After closing the warning message box, the operator can continue the initial job entry as normal. If the Credit hold flag is set and an operator tries to do a purchase order for the customer, the operator will be blocked from generating the purchase order. The operator will see a message box that reads, "This job is in credit hold status. Your credit manager will have to clear this hold status before purchase orders can be produced for this job." Whenever Xebra places a job on hold because the customer is on hold, your credit manager will get an operator message that reads, "Job (job number) was placed on hold because customer (billing code) (billing name) is on credit hold." Nobody will get an operator message if you don't have an operator designated as the credit manager.
6. Xebra will set the 'Credit caution' flag during new job creation if the customer fails the credit check. The purpose of this flag is to alert your credit manager that the customer has a credit problem that requires attention without placing the customer on credit hold. The system won't automatically put a customer on credit hold. It is up to an operator to decide what to do about the caution. If the credit caution flag was set by a previous job entry but the credit check reveals no credit problem at present, the credit caution flag will be cleared by the system.
7. If the 'Prepay required' flag is set during new job entry and the credit hold flag is not also set, the operator is warned by a message box, "Customer (billing code) (billing name) is required to make prepayments." Whenever Xebra sets the prepay required flag on a job because the prepay required flag is set on the customer, your credit manager will get an operator message that reads "Job (job number) was placed on hold because customer (billing code) (billing name) must make prepayments."
