In the SAP R/3 system, the credit control area is the basis for credit management. Credit management can be either centralized (a credit control area for all company codes) or decentralized (credit control area for each company code or for groups of company codes. The credit control area Europe (1000) is used for this scenario.

In IDES, credit management is restricted to certain customers to make sales transactions flow more smoothly. In a real business, however, this restriction would not be necessary. In our model system, we want to avoid that a business transaction not related to credit management cannot be executed because, say, the credit limit has been exceeded.