Hi,

I would like to know the role of department in the session Maintain Business Partners(tccom4500m000). What are the implications (both logistic and financial) of defining a business partner without defining a department.


Sai Krishna

Not maintaining them on Business Partner level is no problem, as it is used as default.

When creating e.g. a sales order, the department is retrieved from the defaults. Here it is mandatory to enter one, so the system will check the integrity.

Hi there,

First of all I guess you are talking about BAANERP50c and higher releases, as from that release onwards some Business Partner role data tables have been extended with a department field (even in the primary index). Here a small story from a financial point of view. The functionality for logistics is in my opinion still minor.

The department (accounting office) was added to solve the problem of different financial data for the same BP.

On for example your invoice-from role you have financial information (maybe financial supplier group), which you want to have different for different financial companies.
If you do not want to solve this with sharing of tables, which can bring troubles, the accounting department principle was developed. It appeared that there was also some requirement to set certain logistical information different per BP per department, like credit control (which is by the way not working, because of technical problems in logistics, the credit limit is the total limit over all departments), and that is why they added to the key's of certain role data tables the department attribute.

How does this work for Finance?
1) First of all in tccom when you create role data for BP, you will always first have to enter a role with empty department.
2) In the GLD parameters you can enter a department (this does not necessarily have to be an accounting deparment, as it could be that you only have one sales office in a certain country with 1 financial company attached and then you can specify the data per that sales office).
It is important to realize that you can link one financial company only to one deparment.
3) Whenever in a certain financial company role data of a BP is required then the search is first for the entry with the department equal to the department entered with the financial company data. If that one can not be found the system will use the role data of the empty department. So with this mechanism (because you link a department 1 to 1 to a financial company) you are able to specify role data per financial company.

What is confusing is that most zoom sessions were not adapted for this (and we could also not do this as the technical browse filters were at that time not available in the Corelli tools, they are now by the way). So you can set up for the same BP many role data with a lot of different departments, say we have BP "X" with departments"A", "B", "C" and of course the empty department.

If in financial company we specify as accounting department "A", then whenever in the financial system we zoom for BP "X", we should still see only one record, either the record with the department equal to "A", or if that one was not entered, the one with department empty. You will notice that most zooms do not take care of this and that is of course actually also not a problem as when you get back from zooming only the BP is taken from the zoomsession, the functionality about to take what record is always applied in the software, so first the search is on with that role data with department equal to the department of the GLD parameters and if that one can not be found the role data with the empty department. I do not really like this solution, but anyway this is how it works.

I hope with this story I made clear that this whole topic is about being able to specify BP role data per financial company.

Regards,
Leerebeer