Customer Hierarchies and Paying Relationships

The customer hierarchy describes the structure of an enterprise or portion of an enterprise. Enterprise structures are defined and maintained in the FND_HIER tables. There are three predefined hierarchies: Customer hierarchy, Trading Community party hierarchy, and Duns and Bradstreet hierarchy.

You assign a paying relationship to a hierarchy to indicate how the parties in the hierarchy are able to manage each other's customer payments. There are two paying relationships:

Pay Any: Any party within the relationship can pay for the accounts of any other party within the relationship.
Pay Below: A parent-child relationship, whereby each party can pay for its own transactions and the transactions of all parties that are lower in the hierarchy (children, grandchildren, and so on).

This figure describes the customer hierarchy in Acme Corporation:

This figure illustrates a sample customer hierarchy, with Acme Worldwide first in the hierarchy, then Acme USA and Acme Japan as two equal branches of Acme Worldwide, and finally Acme West as a branch of Acme USA.

Pay Any Paying Relationship

If this Acme Corporation hierarchy is assigned a Pay Any paying relationship, then:

Acme Worldwide can pay for Acme USA, Acme Japan, and Acme West.
Acme USA can pay for Acme Worldwide, Acme Japan, and Acme West.
Acme Japan can pay for Acme Worldwide, Acme USA, and Acme West.
Acme West can pay for Acme Worldwide, Acme USA, and Acme Japan.

Pay Below Paying Relationship

If this Acme Corporation hierarchy is assigned a Pay Below paying relationship, then:

Acme Worldwide can pay for Acme USA, Acme Japan, Acme West, and its own transactions.
Acme USA can pay for Acme West and its own transactions.
Acme Japan can pay for its own transactions.