How You Use Party Relationships

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.