Credit control
Open-knowledge reference entry
Credit control is the system used by businesses to make sure that credit is given only to borrowers who are likely to be able to repay it. Credit Controllers control lending by calculating and managing risk. A Credit Controller oversees all debts owed to a company from existing creditors and manages requests for new credit. They would use business credit reports or other means to assess whether to continue or extend credit to a customer.
As the creditworthiness of a counterparty can change, credit control adjust the amount of credit that the company is willing to extend over time.
Overview
Credit control is part of the financial controls that are employed by businesses particularly in manufacturing to ensure that once sales are made they are realised as cash or liquid resources.
Credit control is a critical system of control that prevents the business from becoming illiquid due to improper and un-coordinated issuance of credit to customers. Credit control has a number of sections that include - credit approval, credit limit approval, dispatch approvals as well as collection process.
In a large business a credit process will be run by a senior manager and will include processes as such as Know Your Customer (KYC), account opening, approval of credit and credit limits (both in terms of the amounts and the terms e.g. 30 Days, 30 Days net), extension of credit and effecting collection action.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 7, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q16959257. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Credit control” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.