Various characteristics indicating the status of a business partner.
Status information indicates whether the following apply for a business partner:
Can be contacted
Is to be archived
This means that the business partner can be archived during the next archiving run, provided the archiving check shows that there are no active business transactions using this business partner data. If this is not the case, archiving is prevented even if the archiving indicator is set.
If the check shows that the business partner can be archived, it is assigned the status Logically Deleted
and can no longer be used in business processes nor changed manually or by BAPIs. The next archiving run writes the record to the archive and physically deletes it.
For more information, see Archiving Business Partners.
Is blocked centrally
In this case, certain activities cannot be performed.
Is not released for business processes because its data still needs to be checked
Has been blocked for the following processes:
Business transactions (with blocking reasons such as no sales)
Delivery (with blocking reasons such as credit limit, change in quantity, bottleneck)
Billing (with blocking reasons such as check credit or debit memo, check terms of payment, prices incomplete)
Note
You can set the blocks company-wide or in selected sales areas. The sales area-dependent blocks are valid in addition to the central block.
You define blocking reasons in Customizing for Customer Relationships Management
, under .
You can record the different stages of an account as it progresses through its life cycle. Each life cycle stage represents the status of the business relationship, for example, an account might start off as a potential, move on to an intermediate stage as a prospect, before finally becoming a customer.
A life cycle stage is technically a business partner role. A life cycle is technically a role exclusion group to which stages are assigned as roles. These roles are mutually exclusive, meaning that only one business partner role in an exclusion group can be assigned to an account at any point in time. Assigning a role which belongs to a role exclusion group is therefore the same as assigning a unique status.
You can define sequence of statuses to prevent an account from omitting a stage or returning to a previous stage. You do this by defining transitions between the roles contained in a role exclusion group, thus defining the order in which the life cycle stages occur.
You define a life cycle, stages, and stage sequences in Customizing. You also have the following options:
Screen control: Using a Business Add-In (BAdI), you can use the life cycle stage as a criterion for hiding or displaying certain assignment blocks.
Field modification: Using a BAdI, you can influence the fields in the account details based on the life cycle stage, for example, to display additional fields, or make fields mandatory or optional.
Initial life cycle stage: You can default the initial life cycle stage when accounts are created.
Search criterion: You can search for accounts by life cycle stage.
For more information, see the documentation in Customizing for Customer Relationship Management
, under .
Note
The account life cycle is delivered as hidden function and has to be activated in the configuration tool.