Credit holds exist for good reason. Nobody wants to ship to a customer who's already behind on payments without someone signing off first.
The problem is rarely the decision itself. Approving or rejecting a held order might take thirty seconds. Finding out the order is on hold can take a day. Then someone has to release it in Macola, and someone else has to build the order acknowledgement and email it to the customer, who has been waiting the whole time.
This post walks through a real workflow our team built in AI Automation that handles everything around a Macola credit hold approval except the decision itself. The approval stays with a person. The waiting, chasing, releasing, and follow-up don't.
Follow a held order through a typical day and the delays are easy to spot:
None of those steps require judgment except one. Every other step is a handoff, and every handoff is a chance for the order to sit.
Here's the workflow step by step. It's Use Case 3 on our Macola workflow automation page, built in AI Automation with no code involved.
The workflow watches for new orders entered in Macola. As soon as one comes in, it checks whether the order is on credit hold.
If the order is on hold, the workflow creates an approval task and assigns it to the right person. The task shows up in their task inbox with the order details attached, and reminders can go out until it's handled. Orders that aren't on hold skip this step entirely.
When the approver approves, the workflow releases the credit hold in Macola on its own. Nobody has to go back into the order to do it. If the approver rejects the order, the workflow stops there and nothing is released.
Once the hold is released, or right away for orders that were never on hold, the workflow generates the order acknowledgement from your existing Crystal Report, saves it as a PDF, and emails it to the customer.
This use case is the clearest example of how AI Automation handles human judgment. The workflow doesn't decide whether a customer's credit is good enough. A person does. What the workflow does is make sure that decision reaches the right person immediately, and that everything after it happens without anyone having to remember.
A few details make that work in practice:
The approval itself looks almost the same as before. Everything around it is different.
For the credit team, held orders come to them instead of being discovered later. Each task arrives with the order details already attached, so there's no digging through Macola to find the context. Approving is one click, and they never have to go back into the order to release it.
For sales and customer service, "where's my order?" calls about held orders get easier to answer, because there's a clear status: waiting on approval, approved and released, or rejected. And the customer gets their acknowledgement as soon as the order clears, not whenever someone gets to it.
For managers, the run history shows how long held orders actually wait for a decision. That's a number most teams have never been able to see, and it's usually the first thing that improves once approvals stop depending on someone noticing.
The workflow our team built covers the core path. Because it's built from standard building blocks, it's easy to extend:
If you're running a distribution operation, this is exactly the kind of approval bottleneck we describe on our solutions for distributors page.
This workflow connects naturally to the other two use cases in this series. An order that arrives by email can be read and entered automatically, as covered in From Inbox to Macola Sales Order Without Anyone Retyping It. If that new order lands on credit hold, this workflow takes over. And on the other end of the customer relationship, past-due balances can be followed up automatically with past-due invoice reminders that go out on their own.
Each one works on its own. Together, they cover a large share of the everyday handoffs around an order.
Your credit or finance team decides:
An IT staff member or power user who knows your Macola data builds it:
If you're deciding which workflow to build first, the five questions in Which Macola Processes Should You Automate First? are a quick way to compare them.
If held orders are sitting longer than the decision takes, talk to us about automation. We'll walk through what this workflow would look like with your approvers, your Macola setup, and your order acknowledgement.
Q: How can we automate Macola credit hold approvals? A: With AI Automation, a workflow checks each new Macola order for a credit hold, sends held orders to the right approver as a task, releases the hold automatically when it's approved, and then emails the customer an order acknowledgement generated from your Crystal Report.
Q: Does the automation decide whether to approve an order? A: No. The approval stays with a person. The workflow routes the decision to the right approver, sends reminders, and handles everything after they respond.
Q: What happens if an approver rejects the order? A: In the workflow our team built, a rejection ends the run and the hold stays in place. You can extend it to notify the sales rep or customer service so they can follow up.
Q: Is there a record of who approved each order? A: Yes. The workflow's run history records who completed each approval and when, along with any comments they added.
Q: Do we need a developer to set this up? A: No. AI Automation is no-code. Your credit team decides the approval rules, and an IT staff member or power user who knows your Macola data builds the workflow on a visual canvas.