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?
- 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.
- Multiple Transactions: To create vendor or customer we have to go to different transactions. With Business Partner single transaction “BP” is required both objects.
- Centrally managing master data for business partners, customers, and vendors
Customer and Vendor Integration to Business Partner:
- Customer
- Vendor
- 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