A credit limit is the agreed ceiling on how much a customer may owe at one time, recorded on the customer record next to their current balance. In EDGEBIC it is informational: exceeding it produces a warning on the customer record, and it never blocks an order, a quote, or a schedule.
This entry defines the credit limit and shows how it reads inside EDGEBIC by User Solutions. For the wider index of terms, see the manufacturing glossary; for the record it lives on, see EDGEBIC customers and departments explained; and for the identifier that record hangs on, see what is a customer id.
How It Works
Credit limits belong to a family of commercial controls that sit beside production rather than inside it. The idea is simple: a business agrees how much exposure it will carry with a given partner, records that ceiling, and compares it against what the partner currently owes.
Two fields do the work. The limit is the agreed ceiling, and it must be zero or positive. The current balance is what is outstanding. When the balance exceeds the limit, the account is outside its agreed exposure and someone should look at it.
What happens next is the part worth being precise about, because systems differ. Some hold orders automatically. This one does not. Saving a customer whose balance exceeds their limit raises a validation warning that lists the issue and asks whether you want to continue saving, and answering yes saves the record. That is the extent of it. No order is refused, no quote is barred, no job is held back from the scheduler.
That is a deliberate position rather than an omission. Automatic credit holds only work when the balance driving them is live and trustworthy, which requires the system to be the one recording invoices and receipts. Here the balance is a field maintained from your accounting system, not a figure computed from transactions in production. Blocking work on the strength of a number that may be a month old would stop the wrong jobs and quickly train everyone to override the block.
A Concrete Example
An account is set up with a credit limit of 50,000 and a current balance of 12,000, both entered from the finance system. The account is comfortably inside its ceiling and nothing draws attention to it.
Over the following quarter the customer orders heavily and pays slowly. Finance updates the balance on the customer record to 61,000. On save, a validation warning appears noting that the balance exceeds the credit limit and asking whether to continue. The person saving clicks yes, and the record saves with the new balance.
The next day a planner raises a manufacturing order for that same customer. Nothing warns them, nothing is refused, and the job schedules exactly as any other job would. The credit position had no effect on the plan.
That is the behavior to design around. If this shop wants over-limit accounts held, the hold has to happen when the order is raised, by a person who checks the customer record first. The fields tell them what they need to know; they do not act on it for them.
How EDGEBIC Uses It
In EDGEBIC, the credit limit and current balance sit in the financial section of the customer record, alongside a tax identifier. The limit is validated only to the extent that it must be zero or positive. The balance is described as normally maintained from your accounting system, since nothing in scheduling or production posts to it.
The single behavior attached to the pair is a validation warning at save time when the balance exceeds the limit. Warnings of this kind are collected into a prompt that lists them and asks whether to continue saving, and choosing yes saves anyway. Hard errors behave differently: a missing or duplicate customer id, or a duplicate email address, appear in the dialog's error banner and block the save until they are fixed. The credit warning is firmly in the first category.
Because there is no automatic hold, treat the fields as documentation of a commercial agreement and as a prompt for a human check, not as a control. Two habits make them worth having. Refresh the balance from accounting on a regular cadence, because a stale balance is worse than a blank one. And put the credit check in your order-entry process rather than hoping the software will interpose, since by the time a job is on the calendar the capacity conversation and the credit conversation have already diverged.
If receivables are simply not tracked in your installation, leaving both fields empty is the honest option.
For the wider customer record, see what is a customer id. For the orders an account accumulates, see EDGEBIC sales orders explained, and for the account-level delivery view, see on-time delivery rate.
A credit limit is the agreed ceiling on how much a customer may owe you at any one time before their account needs review. It sits on the customer record alongside a current balance figure, and comparing the two tells you whether the account is inside its agreed exposure. It is a commercial control rather than a production one, which is why it lives with the customer rather than with any individual order or job.
No. When a saved balance exceeds the recorded limit, the customer record raises a validation warning listing the issue and asking whether you want to continue saving, and answering yes saves the record anyway. Nothing stops an order being entered, quoted, or scheduled for a customer over their limit. The limit is informational by design, so the decision to hold work stays a commercial one made by a person rather than an automatic refusal made by software.
It is a field on the customer record that is normally maintained from your accounting system rather than calculated from anything inside the scheduling application. Nothing in production posts to it, because invoicing and receipts are not tracked here. That makes it a snapshot whose usefulness depends entirely on how recently it was updated, which is worth knowing before anyone treats it as authoritative during a credit conversation.
Not automatically, because the credit limit here warns rather than blocks and nothing in scheduling consults it. Enforcement has to be a process rather than a setting. The workable pattern is to make the credit position part of order entry: whoever raises the manufacturing order checks the customer record first, and an account that is over its limit gets held at that point rather than after machines are booked. Two supporting habits help. Keep the balance field refreshed from accounting on a regular cadence, since a stale balance makes the check theater rather than control. And record the hold decision somewhere durable, such as the customer notes, so the next person entering an order for that account sees the same picture you did.
Leaving them empty is perfectly reasonable, and it is better than filling them with numbers nobody maintains. A limit and a balance that were entered once at go-live and never touched again are worse than blank fields, because they look authoritative and are not, and someone will eventually make a decision on them. If you want partial value without a maintenance commitment, record just the limit and leave the balance at zero, treating the limit as documentation of the commercial agreement rather than as a live check. The warning will not fire, which is the honest outcome when the balance is not being kept current.
Expert Q&A: Deep Dive
Q: Our finance team wants production to stop scheduling for customers who are over their limit. Can we enforce that?
A: Not automatically, because the credit limit here warns rather than blocks and nothing in scheduling consults it. Enforcement has to be a process rather than a setting. The workable pattern is to make the credit position part of order entry: whoever raises the manufacturing order checks the customer record first, and an account that is over its limit gets held at that point rather than after machines are booked. Two supporting habits help. Keep the balance field refreshed from accounting on a regular cadence, since a stale balance makes the check theater rather than control. And record the hold decision somewhere durable, such as the customer notes, so the next person entering an order for that account sees the same picture you did.
Q: We do not track receivables in this system at all. Should we leave the credit fields empty?
A: Leaving them empty is perfectly reasonable, and it is better than filling them with numbers nobody maintains. A limit and a balance that were entered once at go-live and never touched again are worse than blank fields, because they look authoritative and are not, and someone will eventually make a decision on them. If you want partial value without a maintenance commitment, record just the limit and leave the balance at zero, treating the limit as documentation of the commercial agreement rather than as a live check. The warning will not fire, which is the honest outcome when the balance is not being kept current.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ready to Transform Your Production Scheduling?
User Solutions has been helping manufacturers optimize their production schedules for over 35 years. One-time license, 5-day implementation.
User Solutions Team
Manufacturing Software Experts
User Solutions has been developing production planning and scheduling software for manufacturers since 1991. Our team combines 35+ years of manufacturing software expertise with deep industry knowledge to help factories optimize their operations.
Share this article
Related Articles
The EDGEBIC Scheduling Glossary Index
A themed index to the EDGEBIC glossary: scheduling engine, capacity and calendars, materials and planning, shop floor, reporting, quoting, and data import terms, defined in plain language.
What Is the Critical Chain in Manufacturing Scheduling?
The critical chain is the longest dependent path through a plan once shared machine contention is counted, not just step precedence. Here is how it differs from the critical path.
What Does Finite Capacity Mean in EDGEBIC?
Finite capacity means the scheduler refuses to book more hours on a machine than that machine actually has. See exactly how EDGEBIC enforces it, day by day and shift by shift.