Customer Account Relationships

Use customer account relationships to manage the sharing of billing and shipping services and payment activities between two accounts.

Account relationships let you identify customer 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.

How You Use Customer Account Relationships

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 can't 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 Receivables system option to help manage customer account relationships. Don't 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 Receivables 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.