Field "Trading partner" in the master data and reporting

[Mariya_Yanush]

Last Review: 09th June 2020, release 2005

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Trading Partners

In SAP, separate entities under the same parent company are defined with different company codes. In order to perform intercompany transactions in SAP, you must also define a trading partner on every transaction. A trading partner represents the company code that is in transaction with your company code.

Intercompany Business Partners

Intercompany transactions can be done at either a general ledger account or a sub-ledger level. Typically, as legal invoices are required between companies for certain types of transactions (outside of a cross-charge, miscellaneous billing, or allocation), companies choose to perform the majority of their intercompany transactions at the subledger level.

Customer and vendor accounts for trading partners

Trading partner can be filled in App Maintain Business Partners under role Customer/Supplier->General Data-> Control tab (in German: Partnergesellschaft Nummer; technical field name VBUND).

If the company code is not yet implemented in S4HC then the trading partners shall be maintained by SAP Support via ticket (component XX-S4C-SRV-CON). A special template should be filled specifying ID number, address and currency of trading partner.

General ledger accounts

If you want to use G/L accounts directly, instead of customer and vendor accounts, for the entry of receivables and payables you can also enter the trading partner into the G/L account master record used for direct posting on the balance sheet. It is not a common approach though.

List of Reports including field Trading Partner

App Market Segments – Actuals, App Market Segment - Plan/Actual

App Journal Entry Analyzer

App Display line items in General Ledger

App Manage Customer Line Items and App Manage Supplier Line Items

Also, other Design studio reports contain this field:

App P&L – Actuals, App P&L - Plan/Actual, App Trial Balance

App Cost Centers – Actuals, Cost Center - Plan/Actual

App Profit Centers – Actuals, Profit Center - Plan/Actual

App Functional Areas – Actuals, App Functional Area - Plan/Actual

App Projects – Actuals, App Project - Plan/Actual

[Lucian]

Hi Maria,

good info but i have a small correction about the creation of the trading partners.

This is covered by the org structure app in the countries activated in the system so a customer can do it as self service if the country in case is provisioned.

If a foreign trading partner is required and that country is not available in the system then the impediment process should be followed with the corresponding configuration template attached so that the value is created by SAP support team.

Regards,

Lucian

[Sandeep_Kumar]

mariya.yanush good info, thanks for sharing.

[Yang09]

Thanks for sharing

[MarNow]

Mariya, thanks for brining this topic!

[OwenLiu]

Thanks for sharing!

[Vijayendra]

Thanks for Sharing!

[former_member132345]

Thanks, Mariya!

[prohner]

Dear Mariya,
Thanks for sharing this information.

We are currently working on an S/4 implementation. In our ECC environment, we still use a validation, because we have various direct postings into the G/L without going through the subledger.
If we need to stick to that approach (allowing direct postings), are validations still the approach to be used? It looks like changing the field status group is not a good option and we did not find any other approach.

In future, SAP Group consolidation will be on the plate - if we would continue to use a validation, would that be a problem?

Thanks

Patrick

[former_member755833]

The Trading partner is present in customer and Vendor master data and in General data of control tab. But this also depends upon the BP role which we are selecting.

[EitaroYoshikawa]

This is definitely the one that I was looking for....

Thank you!!!!!

[Winny_Loh]

Thank you for the great documentations.

Would like to kindly ask if we have a scenario where we would like to change the trading partner. For example, trading partner from 1000 to 2000. However, there's transaction in 1000. How to transfer GL line item data with trading partner 1000 to 2000?

Please assist me on this. Thank you.

[Hemant7]

Hello Mariya.

Your article mentions "Trading Partner" as the company code. But the values shown during the drop are companies and not company codes. Can please clarify?

Thanks

Hemant