Organizational units, employees, and users from your company's organizational model can act as partners in transactions. In other words, they can perform partner functions in the same way that other companies or outside people do. In these cases, they are entered in the Parties Involved assignment block rather than in the Organizational Data assignment block. For example, a sales representative could perform the partner function Employee Responsible, or, in inter-company billing, an organizational unit within your own company could be the Bill-To Party. Therefore, organizational data is a crucial source of information for partner determination.

To use organizational data in partner determination, the system uses the determination rules defined in organizational management. Therefore, when you specify organizational data as the source in access sequences in Customizing for partner processing, you must enter a determination rule.

Partner processing is able to recognize organizational objects because, when you create an organizational object, the system automatically creates a corresponding business partner with the role Organizational Unit. Therefore, an object, such as a sales group, has two identities: one as an organizational unit and one as a business partner.