Create a business partner structure for your suppliers

These are helpful in:

Seeking out the best purchase price, when you are dealing with a supplier who is part of a larger group of companies.
Keeping track of the relationships you have with individual suppliers, and how they relate to one another, within a group.

The steps involved in this are:

Select the Work with supplier structures menu item.
You access Work with supplier structure, Holding companies. Click Add to create a new structure.
You access Work with supplier structure, Holding company detail. This supplier 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 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 purchase statistics will be created. It is possible to create statistics for a unique supplier, for the entire structure (the holding company) or for structure parents at the level defined in this field. Since this supplier 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 purchase price to be retrieved from the nearest parent company above the supplier 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 supplier structures, Supplier detail panel. In that instance, the price will be retrieved at that supplier level when orders are created for lower ranking suppliers. See step 5 below.
Supplier: Set to YES if the pricing policy is to be retrieved from the supplier itself.
Best of: Set to YES if you wish the purchase price to be retrieved using both the aforementioned methods, with the lowest of these two being used.

Click OK.

You access Work with supplier structure, Suppliers. Click Add level.
You access Work with supplier structure, Supplier detail. To add suppliers to the structure, directly below the Holding company, complete the following fields:

Supplier: Enter a valid supplier number. This supplier will then be added to the structure on a level that will correspond with the option that you selected in the previous panel. For example, either on the same level as the Parent company, or on a level lower. Only those records that are of type 2 (suppliers) may be selected.
Parent: Set to YES to denote that the supplier you are currently allocating to the structure is to be a Parent company. If this option is selected, subsidiary suppliers may in turn be added to this supplier. Note: Only holding and parent companies may have other companies that rank below them. However, a parent company may indeed have several other parents companies who rank below them.
Stop search: If you wish the system to only search for a purchase 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 supplier. See step 3 above.

Click OK.

A parent company has now been configured. Repeat the above steps if you want to add more parent companies.

Add subsidiary company on a lower level

To add a subsidiary company on a lower level, select one of the records, that is a Parent company. This is denoted with a checkmark in the Parent column. Click Add next level.
You will again access Work with supplier structures, Supplier detail. Complete the fields, as in the steps above and click OK.
The entire supplier structure is now displayed on Work with supplier structure, Supplier, along with details regarding the individual companies ranking and parent level. To change any of these details, click Change.

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