Customer Lifecycle

What it does

Gives every customer a Status that moves through a five-state state machine: Active → On Hold → Credit Hold → Dormant → Archived. Each transition is a deliberate action with an optional reason captured to the audit trail, and only valid transitions are available at any point (you can't skip straight from Dormant to Credit Hold, for example). Archive is a reversible status change. The old "soft delete that never comes back" pattern is gone. A separate, admin-only Delete permanently action is available for data hygiene, with a children-guard flow that stops you from orphaning branch accounts by accident.

What it replaces

Most ERPs give you one customer tickbox: active or not. Sales teams end up tracking "accounts on stop" in a spreadsheet, emails chase credit approvals back and forth, and "archive" usually means hiding a row in a way no-one knows how to undo. This feature replaces all of that with first-class transitions, a dedicated Credit Hold state the accounts team owns, and a reversible archive so nothing is lost in translation.

Who it's for

• Businesses that extend credit: the Credit Hold state gives accounts receivable a dedicated "paused for payment" status that sales can see at a glance on every order they try to raise.
• Sales teams cleaning up customer data: the Dormant and Archived states are a graceful way to retire old records without deleting them, with audit trail and reason capture.
• Teams with tight data-governance or compliance needs: the admin-only permanent-delete permission and children-guard flow make it hard to lose a customer by accident.
• Companies with bespoke approval rules: Transition Gates let you encode "you can't put this customer on Credit Hold if they have open orders" or "only a manager can un-archive accounts older than a year" as custom logic.

What problems it solves

• "Is this customer on stop or not?" The status pill is visible in the customer list, on the overview, and in every action menu. No more chasing accounts over Slack to find out if it's OK to take an order.
• "We accidentally deleted a customer we still needed." Archive is now a reversible status change. One click to restore. Permanent delete is a separate, admin-only operation that requires explicit confirmation.
• "You can't delete that. They have branches." The delete flow detects child customers and blocks with a modal that lists each affected branch and offers two opt-ins: Detach branches (children become roots) or Reassign to a different parent.
• "Why didn't the system stop us putting this customer on Credit Hold? They have open orders." Transition Gates let your business rules live inside the state machine instead of as tribal knowledge. Blocked transitions surface the reason inline on the customer page.
• "Where's the history of status changes?" Every transition fires a domain event carrying the user, the reason, and a timestamp, picked up by the customer's activity feed and the system-wide audit log.