A regular customer asks for goods on credit. You say yes, because you always say yes, and because the alternative is an awkward conversation with someone you have known for years. The decision gets made in four seconds on a feeling about how the last few bills went. That feeling is usually built from the two most recent payments and nothing else.
The information you need is already yours
You do not need a credit bureau to answer this. Every invoice you have raised for that customer, and every payment against it, is a record of exactly how they behave when they owe you money. The problem was never missing data. It was that nobody adds it up.
Four things worth knowing before you say yes
- How long they actually take to pay — measured from the invoice, not from the reminder.
- How often they paid on or before the due date, as a share of all their bills.
- What is currently outstanding, and how much of that is already past due.
- The largest single invoice you have ever let them run up. That is your real exposure, whatever your intentions were.
Why the average matters less than the pattern
A customer who takes a long time but always pays is a financing cost. A customer who usually pays quickly and has just gone quiet on one large bill is a different problem, and the average of the two looks the same. Separating time-to-pay from on-time share is what tells them apart.
How BizGST Pro works it out
The Customer Credit Risk screen builds a profile for every customer from their own settled invoices. Time to pay is weighted by invoice value, so a slow payment on a large bill counts for more than a slow payment on a small one. On-time share is counted against the due date where one is set, and against the invoice date where none is. Current outstanding and current overdue come from the live ledger.
What the score is and is not
Those figures are combined into a score out of a hundred and a band — safe, watch, or risky. It is arithmetic on your own data. There is no external credit check, no bureau, no machine learning, and no information about how that customer treats anyone else. A customer who has never bought from you on credit starts at a neutral score, because the honest answer in that case is that you do not know yet.
The suggested limit, and its honest limitation
Each customer gets a suggested credit ceiling. Read it knowing where it comes from: it is derived from the largest invoice you have ever raised for them, scaled by their band — a multiple above it for reliable payers, a fraction of it for ones to watch, and nothing for risky ones. That makes it a sensible bound on your own exposure. It is not a statement about what that business can afford, and it should not be read as one.
Using it without insulting anybody
The point is not to refuse people. It is to stop the quiet drift where a customer's balance grows past anything you would have agreed to if asked directly. A limit set in advance turns that into an ordinary business conversation at a predictable moment, instead of an uncomfortable one after the number has already got away from you.