What You Should Know About Business Partner Concept in SAP?

Searching for an SAP Business Partner can be a crucial task for your business. Business Partners bring a lot of added functionality to your organization and help them become more beneficial and improve operational efficiency. If you are looking for an SAP Business One partner in Pune then you should familiarize yourself with the concept of business partners and what they do.

What is an SAP Business Partner?

SAP Business Partner is an organization, group of organizations, person, or group of persons in which a company has a business interest. A company would use a partner for a variety of business transactions like order processing and creating sales and purchase orders.

While SAP CRM and SAP FI Contracts Accounts had SAP Business Partner available already, they’ll now be used in SAP FI- Accounts Payable and FI- Account Receivables as well. People who have already worked in SAP ERP know that the SAP Business Partner will replace the SAP Objects Customer, Vendor and other partner objects. What it will not replace is the HR Personnel number.
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Business Partner Categories

There are 3 categories of SAP Business partners.

These are:

• Organizations
• People
• Groups

Concept of SAP Business Partner

An SAP Business Partner becomes the leading object and maintains the master data of the supplier as well as the customer. This approach makes data maintenance easier and creates harmony between the different business functions of a company. Here are some benefits of SAP Business Partner.

Brings Diverse Business Processes Together

You can assign different roles to your SAP Business One partner in Pune. It can become a supplier, a customer, or an employee. It helps in bringing together the diverse and different business processes that a company manages. Not only that, it can do all this from a single transaction and provide a consolidated view of the partner’s data.
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Plays Multiple Roles

Since business partner functions are the same for all, you don’t need to create separate general data for every business partner role. This way, you can use one business partner for different applications. For instance, you can interact with a particular business partner as a vendor in a vendor role or as a customer in a customer role.

Eliminates Data Redundancy

The general information that is maintained for one business partner can be extended to other partner functions as well automatically. This highly integrated nature of data and information flow eliminates a tremendous amount of data redundancy. Thus, you can maintain the general information of an existing business partner and use it in one or more areas.
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Characteristics of SAP Business Partner

• SAP Business Partner is a legal entity and represents the same.
• You can maintain multiple addresses with their corresponding address usages with the help of an SAP Business Partner.
• Unlike the old approach where you can associate one account group with only one customer, now you can assign multiple roles to the same account group or business partner. This is called the business partner approach.
• With features like reuse of data and maximum data sharing, you can consolidate data easily.
• While the specific data is stored for each role, different business partner roles will have the same general data available.
• You can easily maintain multiple relationships with the same business partner.
• You can maintain the time dependency at different addresses relationships, sub-entities & roles, bank accounting, etc.

SAP Business Partner Roles

Roles are referred to as the different functions an SAP Business Partner can serve within a company. The partner acts as a database for the organization and stores information about every person, group, or organization involved in business with them.

Since a business partner can support different roles, the system won’t have to store redundant data for multiple objects. Instead, the roles can just be added to the business partner account.

Some of the roles in which a business partner can be created are:

• Customer
• Employee
• Contact
• Prospect
• Supplier (Vendor)
• Payer
• Plant
• Employee Responsible
• Organizational Unit
• Custom Created Roles

SAP Business partner configuration is an important process for any growing business. Apart from comparing the SAP Business One pricing of different SAP Business One partners in Pune, or any other location for that matter, you should see what roles and characteristics they possess that will help you grow your business. This article should help you know all about the business partner concept in SAP.