Manage credit holds on sales orders

A credit hold stops an order from shipping when the customer doesn't have the credit room for it. Instead of opening, the order lands in Reserved — approved, stock committed, but blocked from fulfillment — and waits for someone to make a call.

It's the safety net for the situation nobody wants: a customer already 4,000 dollars behind quietly gets another 2,000 dollars of goods shipped because nothing was watching.

Terms used on this page

• Reserved — an order status that holds allocated stock but blocks fulfillment. Nothing ships by accident. See Approve, reserve, and allocate stock.
• Exposure — everything a customer currently owes you: unpaid balances on their open orders plus any on-account register charges, less any open credits. One credit limit covers the total.

Turn credit checking on

Credit checking is off until you switch it on, and it's an account-wide choice.

1. Go to Settings → General → Sales Orders.

2. Find Credit limit enforcement and pick a mode:

   Mode	What happens to an over-limit unpaid order
   Off	Nothing. No credit checks at all.
   Warn	A warning appears on the order form, but the order opens normally.
   Hold	The order is approved into Reserved with a credit hold, and can't be fulfilled until it's released or paid.

3. Click Save Changes.

Paid orders are never checked. Money is already in, so there's no credit being extended. Only unpaid orders can be held — including unpaid orders that arrive from a sales channel.

What a held order looks like

Approve an order for a customer with no room left and it goes to Reserved rather than Open, with a banner across the top of the order:

Credit hold — this order is reserved and will not be fulfilled until released.

The banner shows when the hold was placed and gives you two ways forward:

• View receivables — jump to the customer's receivables to see exactly what they owe and how overdue it is, before deciding.
• Release hold — clear the hold and open the order.

Release a hold

1. Open the held order.
2. Click Release hold in the banner.
3. Confirm.

The order moves to Open and can be fulfilled as normal. The release is recorded on the order — who released it and when — so the decision is auditable.

Releasing affects only that order. It doesn't raise the customer's limit or clear a manual credit hold on their record, so the next order is checked again on its own merits.

When a hold clears itself

If the order is paid in full while it's on hold, the hold is released automatically and the order opens without anyone touching it — payment is the thing the hold was waiting for.

Raising the limit instead

Sometimes the right answer isn't to release one order but to change the relationship. Raise the customer's credit limit — or clear their manual credit hold — on their Settings tab, then release the order. See Set a customer's payment terms and credit limit.

Note that raising the limit does not retroactively release orders already held. Those still need releasing, or paying.

Finding held orders

On the Sales Orders list, filter by Credit hold status to pull up everything currently held, so you can work them as a queue rather than discovering them one at a time.

Next steps

• Set a customer's payment terms and credit limit — set the limit a hold is measured against.
• Approve, reserve, and allocate stock — how Reserved works generally.
• Record payments and store credit — pay an order off and clear its hold.