Assignment of a Customer/Vendor

Use

You can use this function to assign a customer or vendor master record from Financial Accounting (FI) to a business partner.

You use this function if you already use Financial Accounting and SAP Business Partner in parallel and want to activate customer/vendor integration to link existing business partners to existing customers/vendors.

Integration

This function is part of Customer/Vendor Integration for the business partner.

Prerequisites

  • You have made the correct settings in Customizing for the SAP Business Partner and for Customer/Vendor Accounts that are relevant for customer/vendor integration. For more information about the Customizing settings, see Customer/Vendor Integration .

  • You have ensured that a customer/vendor has not already been assigned to the business partner. If a customer/vendor has already been assigned to the business partner, then the system issues an error message and terminates processing.

Activities

On the SAP Easy Access menu, choose Link Business Partner to Customer to assign a customer master record and Link Business Partner to Vendor to assign a vendor master record.

On this screen you assign a corresponding customer/vendor to the business partner in a selected business partner role and choose Link .

If the business partner does not already exist in this role, the system creates it in this role with the available data.

You can assign customers only in customer business partner roles and vendors only in vendor business partner roles .

To make assignments, the system proceeds as follows:

  • As leading object, the business partner retains all of its available data and receives any data from the customer/vendor master record that it does not already have.

  • The customer/vendor master record is overwritten with the existing customer/vendor data from the business partner.

Once you have made the assignment, you can process the customer/vendor master record from within the business partner or from within the customer/vendor master record. The customer/vendor master record is automatically updated in tandem whenever you make a change to the business partner that is also relevant for integration and vice versa.

In business partner maintenance the assigned customer/vendor number is displayed in the corresponding business partner role on the Customer: General Data or Vendor: General Data tab page. When you create company code-dependent data, this number is displayed under Company Code .