Customer-Vendor Integration in SAP Business One

In the SAP system, a business partner is defined as the “person, organization, or group with which any company has a business interest.” Organizations can create and manage their business partners or BPs and define their roles. Typically, business partners can be defined as customers or vendors.

However, in businesses, it is common for a vendor to provide you with certain goods and services, and also be your customer, buying different products or services from you. In such cases, businesses manage two separate data records—one for the vendor and another for the customer but the linkage between the two is not reflected in the final records.

How to do Customer-Vendor Integration in SAP Business One

SAP introduced the feature of connecting customer master data to vendor master data in SAP B1 version 9.2 and has been used extensively by businesses ever since. Let’s have a look at how this integration can be done on SAP B1.

1. In the SAP B1 dashboard, open the “Business Partner Master Data” window under the ‘Business Partners’ option.
2. Next, you need to find the customer who is also a vendor in the same window.
3. Go under the ‘Accounting’ tab for that customer and assign the vendor’s name beside the ‘Connected Vendor’ field. Click on ‘Ok’ once done.
4. Now, navigate to the ‘Sales – A/B’ option and open the “Dunning Wizard” window.
5. Click on ‘Next’ to undergo the set-up process until you’ve reached the ‘Business Partners – Selection Criteria’ section.
6. Click on ‘Add’ to open a pop-up window with ‘BP Properties’. Now you can enter the customer code for which you want to add a vendor.
7. After adding the customer to the Dunning Wizard, click on ‘Consider Connected Vendors’ at the bottom of the window.
8. Click on ‘Next’ to continue the setting-up process and close the Dunning Wizard if you don’t want to change anything in the ‘Document Parameters’ and ‘Recommendation Report’ windows.
9. Another place where this is applicable is internal reconciliation which you can find under the Business Partners > Internal Reconciliations > Reconciliation option.
10. This will open the ‘BP Internal Reconciliation – Selection Criteria’ window where you can reconcile customer invoices with vendor invoices.
11. Click on the ‘Consider Connected BPs’ checkbox in the window and enter the vendor code alongside the Business Partner field.
12. Once entered, you would notice that the connection is two-sided so that once you select a vendor, you can see the customer’s transactions as well.
13. Next, you can open the ‘Customer Receivables Aging’ window under the ‘Business Partners’ > ‘Aging’ section to get the ageing report for a customer.
14. There is also an option to consider connected vendors. Just enter the customer code and click on the ‘Consider Connected Vendors’ option.
15. After submitting, you can easily see all the open transactions for that particular customer.

Conclusion

Customer and vendor integration provides a unique benefit when it comes to account reconciliation.

Praxis Info Solutions is a recognized implementation partner for SAP solutions and has enabled multiple organizations across industry domains to leverage the capabilities of the SAP Business One solutions for their business needs.

To learn how Praxis solutions can help you implement customer-vendor integration and much more, get in touch with us today.