
Customer Hierarchies and Pricing
Purpose
Customer hierarchies enable you to apply pricing and rebate agreements that are determined at a higher level than the customer. For each customer or node that you indicate as relevant for pricing, you can create condition records for pricing.
Prerequisites
You must create a pricing procedure in Customizing for sales and distribution for the condition types used in customer hierarchies. The standard version of the SAP R/3 System includes the following condition types for creating condition records in customer hierarchies:
Condition types
Condition type |
Description |
HI01 |
Percentage discount based on the node |
HI02 |
Absolute discount based on material/node |
These condition types have an exclusive indicator in the standard system, which means that if the same condition record is defined at different levels, the first valid record at the lowest level is chosen for these condition types.
You can also define individual access sequences for the condition types for customer hierarchies in Customizing.
Moreover, by using exclusion groupsyou can specify that if similar condition records exist at different levels of the hierarchy, the system takes the most favorable price or discount for the customer (regardless of which level in the hierarchy the pricing data comes from). For further information, see
Condition Exclusion.Process Flow
The following example explains how pricing is carried out in the customer hierarchy:

Smith Central ® Smith North ® Smith Central
The system ignores the Smith Central node, as it is not relevant for pricing. There is a promotional discount in the master record for the Smith North node. Afterwards the system determines the national discount at Smith Central.
Result
Customer 2743 receives the promotional discount and the regional discount.
Customer 2742 only receives the regional discount.