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.