Customer Credit Limit & Hold Manager

The problem this kills

A customer's purchase order lands, and someone has to answer one question fast: can we ship this on credit, or do we put it on hold? To answer it honestly you need three numbers in the same place — the customer's credit limit, what they already owe you (open AR), and what's sitting in the pipeline as new orders not yet invoiced. In most credit shops those three numbers live in three different screens, three different exports, and at least one spreadsheet that only one person knows how to update.

So exposure gets undercounted because nobody added the open orders to the invoiced AR. A customer quietly blows past their limit and keeps ordering. A temporary limit bump that was supposed to last two weeks is still in force four months later because no one remembered to take it down. And the worst case: an order gets auto-held — or auto-released — by a rule nobody reviewed, and now you've either frozen a good customer or shipped to a deadbeat. This isn't a discipline problem. It's a missing tool: one shared screen that totals true exposure, flags the accounts that need a decision, and makes sure a human signs every hold.

What you'll build

A simple internal web app for the people who decide whether to ship on credit. You import three CSVs — credit limits, open AR, and pending orders. The tool rolls everything up per customer and computes the numbers that matter: total exposure (open AR plus open orders, not just invoiced balances), the customer's effective credit limit (base limit plus any temporary increase that hasn't expired), and the available credit left. It then flags every account that's over limit or past due, and recommends a hold or a release with the reason spelled out.

Nothing acts on its own. A clerk or credit analyst reviews the flags and proposes the action; a credit manager has to approve before a hold or release takes effect. Temporary limit increases are first-class: you grant them with an expiry date, and the tool drops them automatically when they lapse and warns you before they do. Every morning Resend emails the team the accounts that need a decision and the temp increases about to expire. When you're done, you export a clean hold list and a complete credit-decision log to hand back to your ERP.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how credit decisions get made today, what your three exports are actually named column by column, exactly which orders count toward exposure, how you define "past due," who grants temporary increases and for how long, and the thresholds that trigger a hold. It reads a short tailored spec back to you for a thumbs-up, then shapes the data model, the exposure math, the flags, and every later step around your answers. You get a tool fitted to your credit shop — not a generic template.

From there the plan walks the agent through importing all three CSVs (with duplicate guards keyed on customer ID, invoice number, and order number), the exposure and available-credit math, the dashboard, the per-customer credit view, temporary limit increases with automatic expiry, the manager approval gate for holds and releases, the daily alert email, and a clean CSV export of the hold list and decision log. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's a "No API yet?" path so you can build and run the whole thing today from spreadsheet exports, no ERP integration required.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This is built like a real finance control, not a toy. The plan bakes in login so only your team gets in; row-level security so a user only ever sees their own organization's customers; a complete audit trail of every credit decision — who proposed it, who approved it, and when; a hard human-in-the-loop approval gate so no hold or release ever takes effect without a credit manager's sign-off and nothing is auto-held; temporary limit increases that carry an expiry and lapse on their own; and duplicate guards so the same customer, invoice, or order can't be counted twice. The tool proposes and records decisions — placing the actual hold in your ERP stays a deliberate, separate, human step.

Who it's for

Credit managers, credit analysts, and AR teams who decide whether to ship a customer on credit and who currently piece that decision together from an aging report, an open-orders screen, and memory. If you can describe how your team totals exposure and who has to approve a credit hold, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, and you'll have true exposure on one screen this weekend.