Credit Management in SAP S/4HANA

2.1 Purpose and design of the Business Partner

The Business Partner is a cross application master record in SAP. It allows for one master record (one account number) to identify the people and/or companies with which we have some kind of business relationship. This could consist of one, or several, relationships.

Some examples of Business Partners are:

• customers
• vendors
• employees
• prospects
• agents
• borrowers

The Business Partner is not a new master record. SAP applications such as Contract Accounts Receivable, Loan Management, CRM, and FSCM have for many years incorporated this master record.

With S4 HANA Enterprise (1610 onward), the Business Partner replaces the traditional customer and vendor master record design in SAP. If you enter the “legacy” transaction codes in the command field (i.e. FD0x, VD0x, XD0x, FK0x, MK0x, and XK0x), or if you select them in the application menu, the system returns a message redirecting you to the Business Partner (BP) transaction (see Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1: Redirection to transaction BP

This new BP transaction gives a single point of entry for creating and maintaining all Business Partners across multiple components. SAP’s previous customer/vendor model was limited and could not support the following additional benefits:

• multiple addresses for a single Business Partner
• time dependency of attributes
• a single Business Partner as both a customer and a vendor

To navigate the Credit Management application menu for Business Partner, follow the menu path seen in Figure 2.2.

Figure 2.2: BP in the application menu

As illustrated in Figure 2.3, once the BP transaction is executed you can use the section on the left of the screen to search for Business Partners, or enter the alpha-numeric key of the master record. This single transaction, BP, supports the create , and display/change activities.

Figure 2.3: BP master record