There are three ways in Paradigm to put Customers on credit hold.
1. Open Company Preferences from the System menu and go to the Sales tab. Here you can set a credit hold that will apply to all customers if they have unpaid invoices older than the specified amount of days [1]. You can also specify an amount overdue that is acceptable so that small overdue amounts will not lock down a customer [2]. The third field in Company Preferences is 'Grace Amount' [3]. This allows a customer's first order over their credit limit to exceed the credit limit by this percentage.
The last two ways that a customer can be placed on credit hold are found in the detail tab for each customer. NOTE: you will need to be logged in with an administrator account to edit customer detail information.
2. You can set a credit limit for the customer that will put new orders on credit hold if they owe you over this amount [1]. Releasing an order that would put the customer over their limit will throw a warning--if the amount they will be over their limit by is greater than the grace amount (see above) then only users with permission to release credit holds will be able to override the warning and release the order.
3. The final way to put a credit hold on a customer is by checking the 'Credit Hold' checkbox[2]. This will put any new orders for that customer on a credit hold that can only be released by administrators.
Notice the 'Ignore Credit Holds Until After' date field [3]. No credit holds will be automatically applied until after this date.
Releasing Credit Holds
Credit holds can be overridden on individual orders by going to the Advanced tab and deselecting 'Credit Hold'. Additionally, the permission to release credit holds can be turned off for any user by going into System->Security->Settings, selecting the user to change, selecting the 'Disallow Override Credit Holds' checkbox, and pressing OK. As mentioned above, if the customer has been placed on manual credit hold by selecting the 'Credit Hold' checkbox in the customer detail, only Administrators will be able to release their credit holds.
NOTE: This How-To is only applicable on Paradigm version 9.211 or better.