Business partners

The business partner's role determines the types of transactions you can carry out with the business partner. For example, you can ship goods only to a business partner with a ship-to role.

The business partner roles enable you to address the correct office and contact, for each part of a business transaction.

For each business partner, you can define the business partner's contacts. A contact can be linked to more than one business partner role.

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.

See Business partner types

You can link a specific department to an invoice-to, invoice-from, pay-by, or pay-to business partner role to define business-partner role data by department. The business-partner role data is used for orders generated for the linked department. The business partner's financial role data is registered in the financial company to which the department is linked.

In Financials, you must group your customers and suppliers into financial business partner groups and set up the control accounts for each group in Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable.

To each invoice-to business partner, you can assign a credit analyst and control the business partner's credit limit.