Creating Customer Relationships
Define relationships between customers to control payment and commitment application. You can create relationships between any customers and indicate that the relationship is either one-way or reciprocal.
When you apply receipts to an invoice in a one-way relationship, the parent customer can apply receipts to the related customer's invoices, but the related customer's receipts cannot be applied to the parent customer's invoices. When applying invoices to commitments, a customer can only apply invoices to commitments that it owns or to commitments of a parent customer to which it is related.
Reciprocal customer relationships allow customers to pay each others debit items and enter invoices against each others commitments.
If you want to let a customer pay another customer's transactions, you do not have to define relationships for all customers. You can simply set the system option Allow Payment of Unrelated Invoices to Yes. See: Defining Receivables System Options.
You can define an unlimited number of customer relationships.
Receivables provides an application-level profile option, OE: Customer Relationships, to let you decide whether to honor customer relationships when entering orders. If you set this option to Yes, you can only choose agreements, commitments, invoice to and ship to addresses and contacts of related customers; if you set it to No there are no restrictions and relationships are ignored.
Prerequisites
To view customer relationships:
1. Navigate to the Customer Summary or the Customers window.
2. Query the customer whose relationships you want to view.
3. If you are in the Customer Summary window, choose Relationships.
If you are in the Customers window, open the Relationships alternative region.
To create a relationship between two customers:
1. Navigate to the Customer Summary or the Customers window.
2. Query the customer for which you want to define a relationship.
3. If you are using the Customer Summary window, choose Relationships.
If you are in the Customers window, open the Relationships alternative region.
4. Enter the Name or Number of the customer you want to relate to the queried customer, or select a customer from the list of values. You can choose from any customer you previously defined. When you enter a customer name, the system displays the related customer number, and vice versa
5. If you do not want this relationship to be active, uncheck the Active check box. By default, customer relationships you create in Receivables are Active.
6. To create a reciprocal relationship between the two customers, check the Reciprocal check box. The default value depends on the value of the Create Reciprocal Customer option in the System Options window. See: Invoices and Customers System Options.
7. Enter the Type of relationship to use to classify your customers, or select a type from the list of values. This field is only for informational purposes. Receivables provides the relationship type 'All' but you can define your own types in the Receivables QuickCodes window. See: Reviewing and Updating Receivables QuickCodes.
8. Enter any additional information about this customer or relationship in the Comment field (optional).
See Also
Customers
Customer Overview
Customer Relationships Listing