information such as the customer’s credit limit, current balance, date of last payment, and current credit status. Based on programmed criteria, the customer’s request for credit is approved or denied.
2. If credit is approved, the system updates the customer’s current balance to reflect the sale and reduces inventory by the quantities of items sold to present an accurate and current picture of inventory on hand and available for sale.
3. The system automatically transmits a digital stock release document to the warehouse, a digital ship- ping notice to the shipping department, and records the sale in the open sales order file. The structure of this file includes a CLOSED field that contains either the value N or Y to indicate the status of the order. Closed records (those containing the value Y) have been shipped, so the customer can now be billed. This field is used later to identify closed records to the batch procedure. The default value in this field when the record is created is N. It is changed to Y when the goods are shipped to the