Suspending or holding a customer
The actions menu offers both Suspend and Place hold, and they answer different questions. Suspending stops new business with a customer. A hold changes how the business you already have with them is serviced and collected.
Neither implies the other. You can suspend a customer who is on hold, hold a customer who is suspended, or do one without ever doing the other.
Which one you want
| You want to | Reach for | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Stop taking on new business with this customer | Suspend | Blocks further business. Existing agreements are serviced as they are. |
| Record that a formal proceeding protects them | Place hold | Exits collections, routes the case to a specialist, and bars enforcement. |
The short version: suspend is about the relationship, a hold is about the circumstances.
Suspending
Suspending is the customer’s own lifecycle. It stops further business with them and Reinstate reverses it. A customer is suspended or they are not — there is no second suspension to place on top of the first.
Use it when the relationship itself is in question: a review of the customer, a decision to stop onboarding them onto anything new, a commercial choice to wind the relationship down.
Their existing agreements carry on being serviced. Suspending does not stop interest, close accounts, or return money.
Placing a hold
A hold records a named circumstance that changes how the customer is serviced. Debt review is the one most organisations start with, and each hold names which protected state it is recording.
Placing one does four things at once:
- Takes the customer’s cases out of the collections queue.
- Routes them to a specialist pool.
- Stops enforcement.
- Stops outbound payments to third parties.
It also records whether your organisation keeps or gives up the authority to collect while the hold runs.
Several holds can run at the same time, because the circumstances they record are independent — a customer in debt review who then dies carries both. You lift each one separately, naming the one you are lifting, which is why Lift stays on the Hold tab beside the hold it releases rather than joining the actions menu.
See Hold for what each row on the Hold tab means.
Where you find them
Both are on the counterparty’s actions menu, under different headings, because they answer different questions:
- Lifecycle — Suspend, Reinstate
- Restrictions — Place hold
A verb you cannot use right now is still listed, greyed, with the reason. On a suspended customer, Reinstate is the one that is available and Suspend is the one that is greyed.
What your organisation configures
- Whether a customer type can be suspended at all. Some types have no suspension lifecycle, and the two verbs are not offered on them.
- Which protected states you can record as holds, and what each one means for collections, enforcement and authority.
- Who may run each verb. Suspending, reinstating and placing a hold are separately granted, so a clerk may hold one and not the others.