Payment terms and credit limits

A new customer has been approved, the sales rep agreed net 30 and a €20,000 limit on the phone, and now somebody has to put that on the record so checkout behaves accordingly.

Payment terms, credit limit, price list and delivery block are the four fields that decide whether an order from a company is accepted. They are edited together.

Set the terms on one company

1. Go to CRM › Organizations and open the company.
2. Open the Commercial terms panel.
3. Set Payment terms. Leave it empty to inherit the store default.
4. Set the Credit limit in the market's currency. Empty means no limit.
5. Set the Price list — the code of the list this company buys on.
6. Leave Delivery block off unless you are actively stopping shipments.
7. Select Save terms.

What each field does

price_list is plain text: it names a list that belongs to the Pricing app. A typo here does not fail loudly; pricing falls back to the default list and nobody is told. Copy the code rather than retyping it. See Price lists.

Maintain the list of terms you offer

The list of terms on offer belongs to your tenant, and you maintain it.

1. Go to Configuration › Value lists › Payment terms.
2. Select New payment term to add one, or open an existing one to edit it.
3. Give it a code (lowercase, stable), a title, and labels per locale.
4. Set position to control the order it appears in, and tone to colour its badge. Use a warning tone for anything that carries risk.
5. Mark one as default if a company created without terms should get it.

Retiring a term is safer than deleting one. Companies already carrying the code keep it, and a term nothing points at any more stops being offered.

Set defaults for new companies

Two store settings decide what a company created without its own terms inherits:

• Default payment terms — None leaves the field empty, which downstream reads as "no terms agreed". That is what an unconfigured store keeps doing.
• Default credit limit — 0 means no default is applied and the company is created without a limit.

Set these once. A shop that imports two thousand customers and then discovers they all have no terms is an afternoon of bulk editing that a five-minute setting would have prevented.

Changing terms on an existing customer

Terms are a commercial agreement, so treat a change as one:

• Loosening terms, prepayment to net 30 or a higher limit, takes effect on the next order and is usually uncontroversial.
• Tightening terms, net 60 down to prepayment, is a message to the customer whether or not you send one. They will find out at their next checkout. Tell them first.
• Record why. Log the decision on the customer timeline so the next person who opens the record knows it was deliberate. See Log customer activity.

Doing it for many companies at once

Terms usually arrive with the customer master, not by hand. If your ERP owns the customer record, map payment_terms, credit_limit and price_list in the import and let it maintain them. See Field mapping.

To find the companies to change, filter the organizations list on payment terms: "everyone still on net_60" is one filter.

What to check

• Reopen the company. The badges in the header show status, lifecycle stage and payment terms at a glance.
• The Commercial terms panel shows what you saved.
• The organizations list has a Credit limit column and a Terms column. Sort by them to spot the companies with nothing set.
• Check a price the customer should see. See Check which price a buyer sees.

Next

• Block a customer — when the terms stop being honoured.
• Contract prices for a customer — the prices behind the price list.