Uses of customer and vendor roles

Customer and vendor roles allow you to share inventory across companies in a multi-company environment. This way, two companies can act as a customer, a vendor, or both to one another. You assign customer and vendor roles to your Inventory Control location(s) when you set up the Inventory Control application. For more information, see the Inventory Control User Guide.

Before you can assign these roles, you must set up a vendor and a customer to represent the location. The vendor and customer records will follow the same setup procedures as if they were real vendors and customers. For more information, see the Accounts Payable User Guide and the Accounts Receivable User Guide.

Example

A corporation, Two Rivers, has a location in Germany and a location in France, can easily share inventory using roles. If Germany is out of an item, then it can request the item from France. Then, Two Rivers in Germany becomes the customer and Two Rivers in France the vendor.

Unable to transfer inventory without using roles

Since this functionality is intended for entities doing business in the European Community, when you ship goods across a country border in the European Community, those goods must have an invoice. In order to create an invoice to ship with these goods, you must use roles to process the transaction as if it were a vendor shipping goods to a customer. Using roles also creates the General Ledger transactions for each company.