Business partner types
To use pricing and invoicing functionality for a party, you must
define that party as a business partner. Business partners can have various
roles and can be of different types.
A business partner's role determines the types of transactions
that you can perform with the business partner. A business partner type
determines the position of the business partner in the multicompany
environment. For example, a partner outside your organization, a logistic
company within your organization, or a department of your
organization.
For multicompany situations, you can define these types of
business partners:
External business partners
Customers and suppliers outside your own
organization.
Internal business partners
An internal business partner is a business partner that is linked to enterprise
units of the same logistic company. You must define all the business partner
roles for an internal business partner.
The internal business partner is used when, for example,
goods are transferred from a warehouse belonging to financial company F100, to
a warehouse that belongs to a different financial company (F200). Intergroup
transactions are created.
A one-to-one relationship must exist between internal
business partners and enterprise units. This means that you can define one
internal business partner for each enterprise unit.
Affiliated company business partner
Logistic companies within the same multicompany structure that
act as a business partner to your logistic company. You must define the Sold-to
and the Buy-from roles for an affiliated-company business partner before you
can define the enterprise modeling data in the EMM module.
The affiliated company is used in these
places:
- The multiplant master plan, to distinguish the dependent
demand from the independent demand when you analyze the order file in
Enterprise Planning.
- Multicompany electronic data interchange (EDI) to determine
the company for which an internal EDI message is intended.
You can define a business partner as an internal business
partner or an affiliated company on the Enterprise Modeling tab of the Business Partner (tccom4100s000) session.
If you define internal business partners and affiliated-company
business partners, you can invoice an enterprise unit or a logistic company,
use pricing and discounts, and maintain a balance of open invoices for the
enterprise unit or logistic company. This can be required for financial
accounting and local tax reporting.