Introducing Accounts Receivable (J59)

The business partner category is the term used to classify a business partner as follows:

• A natural person (for example, a private individual)
• A group (for example, community of heirs)
• An organization (legal entity or part of a legal entity, such as a department of a company)

The business partner category determines which fields are - in principle - available for data entry. For example, if you want to create a business partner as an organization, you are able to enter the legal form in one of the fields. For a person, you enter the first name, last name, gender, and so on. The business partner category cannot be changed once the business partner has been created.

A business partner can have several roles, such as an FI Supplier (FI-AP), FI Customer (FI-AR), Customer (SD), Supplier (MM), or business partner (general). The Business Partner (BP) role corresponds to a business context in which a business partner can appear and provides the application-specific data.

You can create a single business partner in one or more BP roles. Central data such as name, address and bank details only has to be created once. The BP role General Business Partner is automatically assigned to a new business partner.

A customer account comprises at least the following two segments:

• General data common for all roles

• Company code segment

General Data: Application-neutral data, such as name, address, bank details, and payment cards, is stored in the general data of the business partner master record.

Company code: Contains company code-specific data. Any company that wishes to do business with a specific business partner has to create a company code segment. The company code data contains information like the reconciliation account, terms of payment, payment methods, dunning data, or correspondence settings.

In the company code segment, enter company code-specific data. A company that wants to do business with a specific business partner has to create a company code segment. The company code data contains information like the reconciliation account, terms of payment, payment methods, dunning data, or correspondence settings. You can also maintain settings for posting and payment blocks.

The sales and distribution department interacts with customers, so it requires specific data about all of your customers. For this reason, you can create a sales area segment for each customer required.

Any sales area that needs to do business with a customer has to first create such a sales area segment. This segment contains data that is specific to the sales area.

You can access the sales data of Business Partner Master Record using the SAP Fiori app Maintain Business Partner or Manage Customer Master Data.

In the figure, Sales Area Details, you can see some of the fields maintained in the sales area maintenance for customers.

In contrast to other master records, a one-time account master record does not contain any information about a specific customer because it is used for more than one customer. Therefore, the customer or supplier specific fields are hidden in these records.

Enter the required supplier-specific data directly in the document during posting. In reports, you can search the supplier open items by the name and other characteristics entered during document posting.