Create a business partner structure for your customers

Related topics

These are helpful in:

Gaining access to statistical credit information for either the entire structure, or a member thereof.
Keeping track of the relationships you have with individual customers, and how they relate to one another, within a group.

These steps involved in this are:

Allocating a Holding company
Allocating Parent companies
Allocating normal structure members.

Select the Work with customer structures menu item.
You access Work with customer structure, Holding companies. Click Add to create a new structure.
You access Work with customer structure, Holding company detail. This customer will now be listed as the Holding company; the company in the structure that is the highest ranking.

For this example, complete the following fields:

Holding company: Enter the name or customer number of the business partner that you have selected as the holding company
Statistic level: The value entered in this field defines the level in the structure at which sales statistics will be created. It is possible to create statistics for a unique customer, for the entire structure (the holding company) or for structure parents at the level defined in this field. Since this customer is a holding company, enter 1.

Pricing policy
Select the applicable pricing policy. Only one can be selected, choosing from:

Parent: Set to YES if you wish the sales price to be retrieved from the nearest parent company above the customer in question. Since, for this example, this is a holding company (at the highest tier in the structure), set this field to NO. Note: This option will be overruled if the Stop search field is selected in the Work with customer structures, Customer detail panel. In that instance, the price will be retrieved at that customer level when orders are created for lower ranking customers. See step 5 below.
Customer: Set to YES if the pricing policy is to be retrieved from the supplier itself.
Best of: Set to YES if you wish the sales price to be retrieved using both the aforementioned methods, with the lowest of these two being used.

Structure pricing

Price list: Select the price list from the Sales price list table that you wish to use, if this is how you want to retrieve prices.
Discount group: If a price is determined based on details configured under Structure pricing, enter a value from the Discount groups table.

Credit limit service

Credit profile: Enter a value from the Credit profile table to determine the credit afforded for the holding company.
Credit warning %: Enter the percentage value of the total line of credit afforded to this entire customer structure, at which you wish to have an alert message created. For example, if you enter 75%, an alert message will be sent to a predefined user, informing them once 75% or more of the line of credit has been used by this structure. In addition, this will be reflected in the Structure credit analysis printout.

Once you have completed all the fields, click OK.

You access Work with customer structures, Customers. Click Add level 1.
You access Work with customer structures, Customer detail. Most of the fields in this panel are similar to those of the Holding company, as shown in the steps above. Those that differ are:

Parent: Set to YES to denote that the customer you are currently allocating to the structure is to be a Parent company. If this option is selected, subsidiary Customers may in turn be added to this Customer. Note: Only holding and parent companies may have other companies that rank below them. However, a parent company may have several other parents companies who rank below them.
Stop search: If you wish the system to only search for a sales price at this level (and not proceed to lower levels) then set this field to YES. This option will then override other prices when an order is created for a lower level customer.
Credit warning %: Enter the percentage value of the total line of credit afforded to this customer, at which you wish to have an alert message created. For example, if 25% is entered, an alert message will be sent to a predefined user, informing them once 25% or more of the line of credit has been used by this customer. In addition, this will be reflected in the Structure credit analysis printout. Note: This will not be used in the credit control routine. However, it is useful for the purposes of analysis.

A parent company has now been configured. Click OK. Continue to add more parent companies if desired, otherwise click Back to return to the previous panel.

You return to Work with customer structures, Customers, listing those companies which have been added. You can continue to add more companies to this structure by repeating the steps above.

Add subsidiary company on a lower level
In order to add a subsidiary company on a lower level, select one of the records, that is a Parent company. This is denoted by a YES in the Parent column. Click on Add next level.

You access Work with customer structures, Customer details once more. Complete the fields, as in the steps above and click on OK. Bear in mind that some fields are not valid for those companies that are not marked as Parents.
The entire Customer structure is now displayed, along with details regarding the individual companies ranking and parent level. To change any of these details, click Change.

An infinite number of Customers may be added to the structure, which may be of as many tiers as you determine.