| # Business partners You must define your customers and suppliers as business partners. For each business partner you can specify: The business-partner role The business-partner type The business-partner status The contact Business partner's roles The business partner's role determines the types of transactions you can carry out with the business partner. For example, you can only ship goods to a business partner with a ship-to role. The business partner's roles enable you to address the correct office and contact, for each part of a business transaction. For example, your customer's sales office, accounts payable office, and warehouse can all be at different locations or even in different countries. In the business-partner's role details you define for each office or warehouse: The status The main language The address The contact The calendar Note The data of the different roles for one business partner can be interdependent. For example, you must define a business partner's sold-to role and specify a sales office before you can define the business partner's invoice-to role. Customer roles For your customers you can define the following roles: Sold-to business partner Ship-to business partner Invoice-to business partner Pay-by business partner Supplier roles For your suppliers you can define the following roles: Buy-from business partner Ship-from business partner Invoice-from business partner Pay-to business partner A business partner's contact has the same roles as the business partner. The business partner's department You can link some business partner roles to specific departments. The business partner's financial data is registered in the financial company to which the department is linked. For details, see Business partner data by financial company. Business partner default data If you define a new business partner, you must enter many details in the Business Partners (tccom4100s000) session. To speed up the process, you can define default business partner details in the Business Partner Defaults (tccom4101m000) session. In this way, details for the mandatory fields are immediately available and you can create transactions for the business partner. For details, refer to To define a business partner. If you use default business partner details and at a later date, you want to check the data or you want to enter details in the non-mandatory fields, in the Business Partners (tccom4100s000) session, you can select the To be Verified check box. When you have verified the details or entered the remaining details, you can clear the check box. Parent business partner You define parent business partners to indicate the link between business partners with different roles. This enables you to define distributed business partner structures. You can define a business partner without any roles to link related business partners. Financial business partner data In Financials, you must group your customers and suppliers into financial business-partner groups and set up the control accounts for each group in the Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable modules. In the Cash Management module, you can use the following sessions to view the business partners' and your own payment performance: Pay-by Business Partner Statistics (tfcmg3500s000) Pay-to Business Partner Statistics (tfcmg3502m000) To each invoice-to business partner, you can assign a credit analyst and you can control the business partner's credit limit as described in The business partner's credit limit. Enterprise modeling data You must define departments of your own organization's departments that act as customers or suppliers to other departments as business partners and enter the business partners' enterprise modeling data. You must enter the enterprise modeling data of: Internal business partners Affiliated companies An internal business partner can be an enterprise unit that belongs to a different financial company from your own. An affiliated company can be a logistic company that belongs to the same financial company as your own. Other (external) business partners are not represented in enterprise modeling. Related topics Companies - overview To define a business partner Business partner status Business partner contacts Business partner data by financial company The business partner's credit limit |