The master data has a significant influence on sales documents. In this lesson, we recap key aspects of the business partner concept and the customer master concept in SAP S/4HANA Sales. In SAP S/4HANA, we differentiate between business partner master data and customer master data because every customer is a business partner but not every business partner must be a customer.
Customer Master Concept for Sales Documents
In a sales document, you use four mandatory so-called partner functions: sold-to party, ship-to party, payer, and bill-to party. In addition to the four mandatory partner functions, you can create your own partner functions and use them in a sales document.
Watch the video and recap the customer master data concept and how the essential partner functions are determined in SAP S/4HANA Sales.
As outlined in the video, business partners have different partner functions in connection with your company. You use partner functions to define the rights and responsibilities of each partner type in a business transaction. When you sell or order goods, for example, your business partners can assume partner functions such as Sold-to party, Ship-to party, Bill-to party and Payer.
Different business partners may carry out one or more partner functions. For this reason, you can assign individual business partners a number of partner functions. You manage data on business partners in master records. Data on partner functions is stored in these master records and used in Financial Accounting and Logistics as customer master data or vendor master data.
A business partner can be a customer and a vendor at the same time if, for example, your customer also supplies goods to you or if a vendor is also one of your customers. In this case, you must create a customer master record and a vendor master record for the business partner. You can create a link between the two master records by entering the vendor number in the customer master record and the customer number in the vendor master record.
Maintaining SAP Business Partners in SAP S/4HANA
When maintaining business partners (BPs), you use the general business partner concept shown in the following graphic.
You can use the business partner role to carry out a business classification of a business partner. The basis for the definition of a business partner role is a business transaction. The attributes of the BP role depend on the particular transaction involved. The data that is available for a transaction also depends on the Business Partner Category.
You can create and manage your business partners centrally for different business transactions. This is of prime interest if a business partner plays different roles for a company, such as sold-to party and ship-to party. You can create a business partner in different business partner roles. During the course of the business relationship, the business partner can assume other business partner roles. You do not need to create the general data, which is independent of a business partner’s function or of application-specific extensions, again in each case for this business partner. This prevents data being created and stored redundantly.
The following figure illustrates which data you need to maintain when you create a new business partner. First, you must determine the business partner category and business partner grouping and then select one or more business partner roles.
Business Partner Category:
When creating a business partner, you must select a business partner category. The business partner category classifies a business partner as a natural person (private individual), an organization (legal person or part of a legal person, such as a department), or a group (combination of several persons as one person, such as a married couple, family, or house-sharing group). Only one business partner category can be created, and this cannot be changed at a later date.
The business partner category determines the fields in which the user can enter data. For example, when you want to create a business partner as an organization, one of the fields requires you to enter the legal form, whereas when creating a business partner as a person, you have to enter first name, other names, gender, and so on. You cannot create your own business partner category; it is hard coded by SAP.
- Organization: Form of address, name, legal form, industry, legal entity
- Person: Form of address, first and last name, other name components (such as name prefixes and affixes and academic title), gender
- Groups: Form of address, two names, partner group type (marriage, shared living arrangement)
Business Partner Grouping:
- The information in the grouping field determines whether and how the business partner number must be entered in the business partner field.
- When you first create a business partner (BP), you must state the BP category and the grouping. If you use a grouping to which a number range with external number assignment has been assigned, you must enter a number in the BP field. In the event of internal number assignment, you leave this field empty.
Business Partner Role:
- The basis for the definition of a business partner (BP) role is a business process. The attributes of the BP role depend on the particular business process involved.
- BP roles are used to determine screen sequence and field control of the Business Partner master data. You can create a BP with one or more BP roles. Central data, such as name, address, and bank details, only has to be created once.
If you want to use a business partner in a sales document, you need a business partner for which the business partner role Customer is maintained.
When you maintain the Customer as business partner role, the system automatically generates the four mandatory partners that are required in sales in the background. This is controlled in particular by the assignment of the business partner role Customer toAccount Group, which enables customer/vendor integration.