What is Business partner?

A Business Partner can be a person, organization, a group of people, or a group of organizations, in which a company has a business interest. It is the single point of entry to create, edit, and display the master data for business partners, customers and vendors. A Business Partner consists of general data like name, address, bank information, etc. as well as role specific information i.e. customer/vendor/employee data.

Why Business Partner?

1. Data Redundancy: A person can be a Vendor as well as customer, in traditional ERP we have to create two objects. With business partner single object is only required.
2. Multiple Transactions: To create vendor or customer we have to go to different transactions. With Business Partner single transaction “BP” is required both objects.
3. Centrally managing master data for business partners, customers, and vendors

Customer and Vendor Integration to Business Partner:

1. Customer
2. Vendor
3. Business partner

In Traditional ERP, we have Customer and Vendor as a different object.

For Customer, we have following views:

• General
• Finance
• Sales

For Vendor, we have following views:

• General
• Finance
• Purchasing

For creating their objects we need a different Transaction code:

• Customer: XD01, FD01, VD01
• Vendor: XK01, FK01, MK01
• In S4 HANA both customer and vendor get created with Transaction BP.

Business Partner Customizing