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About Third-Party Purchase Order Credit Checking Applications

Before completing an order for products or servicesSiebel eSales, your company may want to assess whether the customer has a credit rating that is good enough for you to sell to them. Different applications are used to perform credit checks depending on the method of payment.

• For business customers paying with purchase orders, a back-office, third-party accounts receivable or credit management application does credit checks on the customer account. This chapter describes how to set up these applications.
• For customers paying with a credit card, a third-party payment application does credit checks. This feature is available in customer applications. For more information about third-party payment applications, see Siebel eSales Administration Guide.

Third-party accounts receivable or credit management applications use logic to make a credit determination based on your company's previous history with the customer account and other credit data.

Integration with third-party credit checking applications uses a specific, prebuilt Application Services Interface (ASI) named External Credit Check. Some configuration is required to set up this integration, as described in this chapter.

For information about how to extend these integration objects, see Integration Platform Technologies: Siebel Enterprise Application Integration.

Sales representatives or call center agents can make purchase order credit checks for a quote or order. In the order process, this is done at the payment line level, when the user clicks the Credit Check button in an order. In the quote process, it is done at the header level, when the user chooses the Verify menu option in a quote. Two workflows directly control the process of checking the credit status of business accounts. These are:

• Credit Check - Quotes
• Credit Check - Orders

In Siebel eSales, credit checks are performed as part of the check-out process after the customer clicks the Check Out button. The following two workflows directly control the process of checking the credit status of business accounts in Siebel eSales:

• eSales - Authorize Order Process
• Credit Check - Quotes

For more information about the customer check-out process, including the details of these workflows, see Siebel eSales Administration Guide.

Siebel Application Service Interface (ASI) is used to integrate order management with third-party credit-check applications. For an overview of how ASIs are used for integrating order management, see About ASIs for Order Management. For more information about to how to set up, use, and modify integrations based on ASIs, see Integration Platform Technologies: Siebel Enterprise Application Integration.