BP Role Contract Partner 

Definition

A contract partner is connected with the company through contract accounts and through the conclusion of contracts. Contract accounts can therefore only be assigned to a business partner and services billed accordingly if you have created this business partner in the role of contract partner in the business role MKK for role category MKK.

 If you want to use business partner roles on a time-dependent basis, make sure that you do not restrict the business role MKKfor role category MKK with regard to time. It must always have a validity from the current data to 12/31/9999.

Use

As a contract partner receives services from the company and has to be billed for these services, you also have to define control and payment data on the contract partner. In addition to bank details, you can enter general data on the contract partner, such as the business partner type and creditworthiness. Creditworthiness is determined and updated automatically, but you can overwrite this.

A company must have the following information on a contract partner:

·        Address: Name, form of address, academic title, name suffixes and prefixes, personal data, street address, postbox address, communication methods

·        Control/payment transactions: Bank details and general data (creditworthiness)

·        Relationships: Relationships to other business partners (see Relationship Categories)

  Industry Component Utilities

In the Utilities industry component, you can define additional data for the contract partner, for example, the following general data:

§         Driving license number

§         Social insurance number (USA)

§         Employee classification

§         Account category (as default value for contract account)

Processing the Contract Partner

You can process business partners in the role MKK  in the SAP menu under Master Data ® Business Partner. You can process all roles of a business partner in transaction BP in the menu of SAP Business Partner.

You can delete the role MKK as soon as there are no further contract accounts for a contract partner in the system. When you delete the role MKK, the corresponding entry in the shadow table for this contract partner is automatically deleted.

Tax numbers for business partners

You can define any number of tax numbers. You assign these to tax number categories that control the usage and check of tax numbers.

Checking dependencies of master data changes

If you have set the indicator Business Partner Dependency in the Implementation Guide for Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable under Basic Functions ® Contract Partner ® Activate Additional Checks for Master Data Changes to Business Partner, the system informs you that bank details, payment card details, or the address of a contract partner is still used in a contract account if you try to delete this information. You cannavigate to the maintenance of the contract account to remove this inconsistency.

Check digit for contract partners

When you create a contract partner, you can add a check digit to the contract partner number. The prerequisites are as follows:

·        You add the check digit procedure using event 1051. Sample function module FKK_SAMPLE_1051_2_CHECKDIGITS for two check digits is supplied by SAP.

·        The contract partner is created with internal number assignment.

The number range is configured such that it begins with a leading zero (check digit procedure with one check digit) or with two leading zeros (procedure with two check digits).

Shadow table for business partners

If you have a large dataset of business partners, you can improve the performance of mass runs by using the FI-CA shadow table that contains the most important business partner data. If the shadow table is active, the system automatically maintains the shadow table during business partner maintenance. If you want to use the FI-CA shadow table:

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       1.      Activate the function in the Implementation Guide for Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable under Technical Settings ® Activate Performance Improvement for Mass Runs by setting the relevant indicator.

       2.      You can now create the shadow table using mass activity GPSHAD_NEW.

       3.      If you have used planned changes for SAP Business Partner before a release change and the shadow table has already been filled, before you run a mass activity for the first time you have to run report RFKKGPSHUPDATE. This report invalidates the entries in the shadow table for business partners for whom there are unimplemented planned change documents. This prevents obsolete data being read from the shadow table.
To revalidate the invalidated entries in the shadow table, you have to run mass activity GPSHAD_UPDATE. This improves the performance of the read accesses to business partner data since, for invalidated entries in the shadow table, the system has to read data from diverse database tables of SAP Business Partner.

       4.      To keep the content of the table up-to-date, schedule report BUPTDTRANSMIT regularly for application MKK. This report recognizes whether there have been changes to master data due to moves and reflects these in the shadow table.

Data cleansing

The functions described in the Data Cleansing section of the documentation for SAP Business Partner are not supported for FI-CA due to the data structure.

See SAP Note 871094.