Maintaining Business Partner Master Data

As a sales representative, you centrally maintain the master data for customers and vendors in SAP S/4HANA by using the business partner master data approach.

Watch the video to learn how business master data is managed in SAP S/4HANA and what partner functions must be maintained (for example, customer).

Take a Minute to Recap

You create a sales document and realize that the business partner is already maintained. Where can the data come from in the standard system?

Hint

In the standard system, the business partners are automatically copied from the customer master when creating sales documents. The system takes the sold-to party from the customer master.

Sometimes, you may need to change the master data of a particular customer. The customer may have moved to a new location, or you may want to change the payment terms, for example. The changes you make to customer master data do not affect sales documents that have already been entered for the corresponding customer in the system. If such changes are required, you have to perform them in the documents manually after changing the master data. However, the address of the customer is an exception, and this is always kept current in each document.

Explore the figure below to identify the effects of changes in customer master data.

As illustrated, a change to the address in the business partner master immediately affects all sales documents. However, you can also define time-dependent address changes in the business partner master record. The address then changes only as of the time defined in the business partner master record.