Oracle® Fusion
Applications
Financials Implementation Guide 11g Release 1 (11.1.4) Part Number E20375-04 |
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This chapter contains the following:
Manage Receivables Customer Profile Classes
Use customer account relationships to manage the sharing of billing and shipping services and payment activities between two accounts.
Account relationships let you identify accounts that can receive shipments or invoices for another account, as well as accounts that can pay for the open debit items of other accounts.
Use the Relationships tab of the Edit Account page to create and maintain account relationships for a particular customer account.
A customer account relationship is either a one-way relationship or a reciprocal relationship. By default an account relationship is one-way, meaning that the parent account can apply receipts to open debit items of the related account, but receipts in the related account cannot be applied to open debit items of the parent account. If you want to allow the two accounts to pay for each other's open debit items, then enable the Reciprocal option for the relationship definition.
Enable the Bill To and Ship To options for relationships that involve billing and shipping services. In a one-way relationship, the parent account can process invoices and receive shipments for the related account. In a reciprocal relationship, either account can manage these services for the other account.
You can use the Allow payment of unrelated transactions system option to help manage customer account relationships. Do not enable this option if you want to restrict the sharing of receipt application and billing and shipping services to the account relationships that you define for each customer account.
If you do enable the Allow payment of unrelated transactions system option, then any customer account can pay for the open debit items of any other customer account. You can still use account relationships to manage billing and shipping services.
Use the customer account record to maintain detailed information about each of your customer accounts.
There are these points to consider when entering and updating customer account information:
Payment Details
Communication Information
Account Relationships
Account Profiles
Use the Payment Details region to maintain active receipt methods and payment instruments for use by this customer account. During transaction and receipt entry, Oracle Fusion Receivables assigns the primary receipt method and payment instruments as the default. You can override these defaults at the transaction or receipt level with another active receipt method or payment instrument.
Receipt Methods: Assign automatic and manual receipt methods to the customer account. Start and end dates for each receipt method must not overlap.
Assign automatic receipt methods for use with automatic receipts. Automatic receipt methods determine the required processing steps for automatic receipts, including confirmation, remittance, and reconciliation.
Assign manual receipt methods to indicate which form of receipt to use to collect payment for transactions belonging to this account.
Payment Instruments: Assign credit cards and bank accounts to this customer account. The payment information that you create here is stored in Oracle Fusion Payments for use during funds capture processing.
You assign bank accounts for use with automatic receipts. The bank accounts you specify are used by the automatic receipt process to transfer funds from these accounts to your remittance bank accounts.
You can define multiple customer bank accounts in different currencies and assign bank accounts to customer addresses. The primary bank account for a particular currency is used as the default account during automatic receipt processing. You can define multiple, non-primary accounts in the same currency, even if the date ranges overlap.
Use the Communication region to maintain customer contact persons for a customer account. Information that you can maintain for each contact includes:
Name and job title.
Contact points, such as phone and fax numbers, e-mail and instant message addresses, and URLs.
Job responsibilities.
Addresses. You can either enter new addresses specific to the contact, or you can enter addresses of account sites belonging to the customer account.
You can create a new contact person or add an existing contact person for a customer account or account site. If you are adding an existing contact person, you must define a party relationship at the customer level for each party and assign the party the Contact role type.
Use customer account relationships to manage the sharing of billing and shipping services and payment activities between two accounts.
The account profile is the profile class record assigned to this customer account for a specified time period. You use the profile class record to organize your customer accounts into categories that reflect the needs of your enterprise. After you assign a profile class, you can modify the profile according to the needs of a given customer account.
Enter and maintain address information for your customer records in Oracle Fusion Receivables.
When you create a customer, you must enter account and address information. This address becomes an account site record of the customer.
When you create additional customer accounts for the customer, you can either enter new address information to create a new account site, or you can use an existing account site. If you assign an existing account site to the new account, you can modify the address information itself, but you will receive a warning if this address is shared by other parties.
There are these points to consider when entering and updating customer address information:
Update Sharing
Account Site Details
Address Purposes
Reference Accounts
If you update an address due to incorrect or missing information, these updates are shared with all account sites that use this address.
Update sharing applies to address information only, and not address details or business purposes.
Use the Account Address Details subregion to identify these values for the account site:
Customer Category Code: Used to classify this customer according to the needs of your enterprise. You define these category codes under the Oracle Fusion Trading Community Model.
Translated Customer Name: Used to enter the customer name in another language. The translated name replaces the customer name on external documents.
Assign address purposes to account sites to identify the functions performed by each particular customer account site. You can designate one account site as Primary for each address purpose.
Common address purposes include:
Bill-to: Assign the bill-to address purpose to account sites designated to receive and process bills. You must create at least one bill-to site to process transactions for a customer.
Ship-to: Assign the ship-to address purpose to account sites designated to receive goods purchased by the customer account.
If you create a ship-to address purpose, you must indicate the related bill-to site that processes the bills for the shipped goods.
Bill-to sites available for association with ship-to sites either belong to the same customer account or to related customer accounts.
Deliver-to: Assign the deliver-to address purpose to sites that receive all or part of goods sent to a ship-to site.
Bills of lading: Assign the bills of lading address purpose to sites that manage contracts for carriers that ship customer goods.
Dunning: Assign the dunning address purpose to sites that receive dunning letters from you.
Late Charge: Assign the late charge address purpose to the site that is assigned the late charge policy for this customer account.
If the Statement, Dunning, and Late Charges Site Profiles Used profile option is set to Yes, then Receivables uses the late charge policy assigned to the late charge site to calculate late charges on transactions. If the profile option is set to No, then receivables uses the late charge policy assigned to the bill-to site assigned to the transaction.
Assign distributions for revenue, freight, receivable, AutoInvoice clearing, tax, unbilled receivable, and deferred revenue accounts to customer bill-to sites. If AutoAccounting depends on Bill-to Site, then Receivables uses the bill-to site of the transaction to determine the related segment for these distributions.
By default the Manage Customers page displays in the Sites region the account sites assigned to the selected customer account. If you enable the Show related contact sites option, the Sites region displays additional sites.
Additional sites may belong to related parties that, through some action of the party, were used as account sites. For example, an employee placed an order on behalf of the customer account, but used his or her own address as the shipping address. This created an account site for the customer account with the employee address as the account site address.
Additional sites may also be part of data migration, such as existing account sites from other systems that are linked to the customer account.
Use profile classes to organize your customer accounts into categories that reflect the needs of your enterprise. The profile class record contains generic options that you can set in different ways to group your customers into broad categories, such as by industry, location, size, creditworthiness, business volume, or payment cycles.
For example, you might define three profile classes that reflect customer payment behavior: one for customers who pay promptly; one for late paying customers with high late charge rates; and a third for customers who for the most part pay on time, with discount incentives for early payment.
When you create a customer account, Oracle Fusion Receivables assigns the profile class DEFAULT. Use the Edit Account page to modify this profile class or assign another profile class to the customer account.
When you create an account site, Receivables does not assign either the DEFAULT profile class or the profile class of the customer account. Use the Create Site Profile page to assign the first profile class to an account site. Use the Edit Site page to update or assign a new profile class to a customer site.
After you assign a profile class to an account or site, you can customize details of the profile class to meet specific requirements for that account or site. For example, a particular site may transact business in a separate currency, or the site may be subject to additional late charges or penalty charges. These updates apply only to that particular account or site and do not affect the profile class record itself.
Profile class updates and assignments are managed using effective date ranges. Each profile class that you assign or update supersedes the previous profile class for the given date range. In this way you can manage over time the changes that take place in customer behavior or customer requirements. The date of a given transaction or receipt determines which account or site profile applies to the activity. The profile history for an account or site provides details of when a given version of a profile class is active.
After you update an existing profile class, Oracle Fusion Receivables presents you with three options for how to save your updates. You update the profile class record only, or you can update the profile class record along with updating in different ways the profiles that make use of this record.
The three options for updating profile class records are:
Apply changes to new profiles only.
Apply changes to uncustomized profiles and version existing uncustomized profiles
Apply changes to all profiles and version all existing profiles.
This update process is managed by the Propagate Customer Profile Class Update program.
This option updates the profile class record only. It does not apply your updates to any account or site profile that uses this profile class.
The changes you make to this profile class will apply to new account or site profiles that are assigned this profile class.
This option applies versioning to profiles that do not have customized settings in this way:
Updates the profile class record.
Applies your updates to uncustomized account and site profiles that use this profile class.
Creates a new version of account and site profiles that use this profile class, using the system date as the effective start date.
Assigns the previous version of account and site profiles that use this profile class an effective end date of the day before the system date. This previous version remains valid within its effective date range.
Use the Profile History tabbed region of account and site records to view the versions of a profile.
This option applies versioning to all profiles in this way:
Updates the profile class record.
Applies your updates to all account and site profiles that use this profile class.
Creates a new version of account and site profiles that use this profile class, using the system date as the effective start date.
Assigns the previous version of account and site profiles that use this profile class an effective end date of the day before the system date. This previous version remains valid within its effective date range.
Use the Profile History tabbed region of account and site records to view the versions of a profile.
The customer profile class shares these default settings with other parts of Oracle Fusion Receivables: Match Receipts By; AutoMatch rule set; AutoCash rule set; AutoInvoice Grouping rule; payment terms; and tax printing options. Each of these settings is used according to the hierarchy required by the transaction or receipt process.
For receipt processing:
Receivables searches for a Match Receipt By value to use for receipt and transaction comparison in the order: customer site profile, customer account profile, lockbox (for lockbox processing), and system options.
Receivables searches for an AutoMatch rule set to determine how receipts are applied automatically and transactions recommended for manual application in the order: customer site profile, customer account profile, lockbox (for lockbox processing), and system options.
If Receivables cannot match receipts to transactions, the application searches for an AutoCash rule set to use to apply receipts in the order: customer site profile, customer account profile, and system options.
For transaction processing:
During AutoInvoice import, Receivables searches for an AutoInvoice grouping rule to use to group transaction lines into transactions in the order: transaction source, customer site profile, customer account profile, and system options.
Receivables searches for the payment terms to use on a transaction in the order: customer site profile, customer account profile, and transaction type. If the payment terms come from the site profile or account profile, and the Override terms option is enabled, then you can update the default payment terms on the transaction.
Receivables searches for the tax printing option to use to print tax on transactions in the order: customer site profile, customer account profile, and system options. If no value is found then Receivables uses Total Tax Only as the default value to print transactions.
You create customers to properly record and account for sales transactions, as well as to identify other attributes of the selling relationship. Recording a sales transaction requires that a customer, stored as a party in Oracle Fusion Trading Community Model, has both an account and an account site with a bill-to purpose.
To understand the role of a customer in the context of the trading community model, it is helpful to understand a few related concepts. The key concepts related to customers and customer activities are:
Party
Customer
Customer Account
Site
Relationship
Contact
A party is an entity that can enter into a business relationship with another party, such as buying and selling goods or offering services. A party is either an organization or a person. A party exists separately from any business relationship that it enters into with another party.
A customer is a party, either an organization or a person, with whom you have a selling relationship. This selling relationship can result, for example, from the purchase of products and services or from the negotiation of terms and conditions that provide the basis for future purchases.
A customer account represents the attributes of the business relationship that a party can enter into with another party. The customer account has information about the terms and conditions of doing business with the party.
For example, you can create a commercial account for purchases made by a company for its internal use, and a reseller account for purchases made by the same company for sales of your products to end users.
You can create multiple customer accounts for a party to maintain information about different categories of business activities. For example, to track invoices for different types of purchases, you can maintain an account for purchasing office supplies and another account for purchasing furniture.
You can also maintain multiple customer accounts for a customer that transacts business with more than one line of business in your organization.
You can share information about a party, such as profile, addresses and contacts, across the customer accounts of the party. In addition, you can also maintain separate profiles and contacts, along with contact addresses and contact points, for each customer account.
A site is a point in space described by an address. A party site is the place where a party is physically located.
An account site is a party site that is used in the context of a customer account. A customer account can have multiple account sites.
A customer address is an account site that is used for billing, shipping, or other purposes that are part of the selling relationship. An identifying address is the party site address that identifies the location of the party. Every party has only one identifying address, but a party can have multiple party sites.
A party relationship is the role of the party in the context of another party. Examples include affiliate, subsidiary, partner, employee of, or contact of.
An account relationship between different customer accounts of a party allows for the sharing of billing, shipping, and payment information.
A contact is a person who communicates for or acts on behalf of a party or customer account. A contact can exist for a customer at the account or site level.
A person usually acts as a contact for an organization, but can also act as a contact for another person. For example, an administrative assistant is often the contact for an executive.
Use party relationships to model your customer records according to the way you conduct your business. Party relationships can help you better understand and make decisions about the customers that you do business with.
Define party relationships to use with your customer records. A party relationship record contains the name of the party that relates to the customer, the way in which the party relates to the customer (relationship role), and the period of time that this particular relationship exists. You can then add these parties as contacts belonging to the accounts or account sites of a given customer.
A party relationship represents the way two entities interact with each other, based on the role that each entity takes with respect to the other. For example, the employment relationship between a person and an organization is defined by the role of the person as the employee and the organization as the employer.
A relationship can be reciprocal. Each entity is either the subject or object, depending on the perspective, or direction. The party that you define relationships for is the subject, and the party that you relate to is the object. For example, if Joe is the employee of Oracle, then Joe is the subject and Oracle is the object. Oracle as the employer of Joe, which reverses the subject and object, still describes the same relationship.
Use the tax profile to maintain optional tax information about your customers and customer sites. You create third party tax profiles under Oracle Fusion Tax. You can update the tax profile record in Oracle Fusion Receivables for the applicable customer or customer site.
Receivables does not populate an account site record with the tax profile belonging to the customer record. You must define a separate tax profile for each account site, according to the requirements of the site. Tax profile records defined at the account site level take precedence over the tax profile record defined at the customer level.
For example, a customer level tax profile might not include tax exemptions. However, one of the related customer account sites may be located in a developing country or region, where tax incentives for businesses include tax exemptions on specific products or services. In this case, you should define and maintain a separate tax profile for this account site.
If you have Oracle Fusion Data Quality installed, the Oracle Fusion Trading Community Model manages the merging of duplicate and redundant customer records.
You can manually merge two customer records from the Manage Customers page. Search for the customer or customers that you want. Then select a customer, and select the Merge Record command from the Actions menu to display the Merge dialog window. Use this window to select the master and duplicate records, and complete the merge request.
No, creating the customer person or organization record only establishes this party as having some kind of selling relationship with you. After creating a customer, you also need to create at least one account and one account site with a bill-to purpose under the customer record in order to properly record and account for both sales transactions with the party and other attributes of the selling relationship with the party.
If you have Oracle Fusion Data Quality installed, the Oracle Fusion Trading Community Model manages the control of duplicate and redundant party information.
If you enter party information resembling or matching existing information, then depending on your setup you are prompted in different ways to manage this information: prevention of data entry; inclusion with confirmation of the data entry; or review and selection of matching or similar data.
Use the Edit Account pages to update information related to the accounts created for this customer.
Use the Edit Site pages to update information related to the sites created under a customer account. This includes address information and the tax profile for the related account site.