Business partners

You must define your customers and suppliers as business partners.

For each business partner you can specify:

  • Business partner roles
  • Business partner status
  • Contacts
  • Business partner types

Business partner roles

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.

Customer roles

For your customers you can specify these roles:

  • Sold-to business partner
  • Ship-to business partner
  • Invoice-to business partner
  • Pay-by business partner

Supplier roles

For your suppliers you can specify these roles:

  • Buy-from business partner
  • Ship-from business partner
  • Invoice-from business partner
  • Pay-to business partner

Business partner contacts

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

Parent business partners

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.

Business partner types

You can specify these types of business partners:

  • External business partners
  • Internal business partners
  • Affiliated-company business partners

See Business partner types

Departments and sites

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.

You can specify commercial and invoicing data that is specific to a department and a sold-to or buy-from role using these sessions:

  • Sold-to Business Partner by Department (tccom2110m000)

    To specify sold-to data by sales office, service office, or accounting office.
  • Buy-from Business Partner by Department (tccom2120m000)

    To specify buy-from data by purchase office or accounting office.

If the multisite functionality is activated for your company, you can specify logistic data that is specific to a site and a ship-to or ship-from business partner role. Use these sessions to specify ship-to and ship-from data by site:

  • Ship-to Business Partner by Site (tccom2111m000)
  • Ship-from Business Partner by Site (tccom2121m000)

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 Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable.

To view the business partners' and your own payment performance, use these sessions:

  • 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 control the business partner's credit limit.