Suspending and closing an account

Two states take an installer out of service, and they are not the same weight. Suspension stops an account working. Closing ends it.

Suspending

Every live row in the console carries a Suspend button where a pending row carries Take live. That is the only action on a row, so suspending is one click from the estate list.

Three things happen:

• The calculator goes offline. The installer’s address stops serving the six steps, so no new enquiry can be made.
• The dashboard becomes read-only. Attempts to change anything are refused with “This account is suspended.”
• The pipeline stays readable. Every lead, quote, note, message and document is still there and still theirs to open.

The installer sees a banner across their dashboard saying so in as many words: their pipeline is still here and still theirs to read, but nothing can be changed and the calculator is offline.

Why it is built that way

Suspension is usually a commercial matter, not a safety one, and taking a company’s own customer records away from them over a commercial matter is a different kind of act. The read-only line lets an account be stopped without anybody losing sight of work in progress. It also removes the argument: nobody has to be talked down from “you have my leads”, because they still have them.

It stops new harm, which is the part that matters. A suspended calculator cannot quote anybody, so whatever the account was suspended over cannot happen again while the suspension stands.

Closing

Closing is the end state. The dashboard is locked entirely, so nobody at the installer can sign in and read anything, which is exactly the difference from suspension.

Read access goes with it

Because closing takes away the read access that suspension leaves in place, do not treat it as a tidier suspension. If the installer has any interest in their own records, they need to have taken their Export to Excel first, while they can still open the dashboard. That export carries the whole pipeline as a real spreadsheet, so it is a reasonable parting gift and it takes them one click.

Choosing between them

• Suspend when the account should stop working but the relationship, or the argument, is still live.
• Close when it is finished and nobody is coming back.

Both statuses show on the row in the console, so the estate list stays an honest picture of who is running and who is not. If you are unsure which applies, or what it will take to reverse, ask before you tell the installer a timescale: these two controls are quick to use and slow to explain away.