Setting up

Several companies

A partner is one record even when it trades with four of your legal entities. What differs per company is the account it trades under, not the partner.

If you run several legal entities, the same chain probably buys from more than one of them. The obvious arrangement is a partner per company, and it is the wrong one: four copies of the same identifiers, four transports to keep in step, and four places to change when they move.

The module does the opposite. One partner, shared. What varies per company is the link: which customer or vendor account, under which identifier, in which company.

How a document finds its company

An arriving document carries two identifiers: the sender and the receiver. The receiver identifier is yours, and your organisation records say which company answers to it. The sender identifier is theirs, and the partner links say which account that is in that company.

Both halves have to agree. A document addressed to a company where the partner has no link has arrived somewhere it has no business being, and it is held rather than guessed at.

Agreements are per partner, not per company

The agreements say what you exchange with that partner. If you invoice them from two companies, both companies send under the same invoice agreement, using the identifiers of the company that posted.

That is nearly always what you want. Where it is not, the honest answer is that the two relationships are genuinely different agreements with the same company, and they should be two partners with two codes.

Looking across companies

The partner card shows every customer and vendor account the partner trades under, in every company, from wherever you happen to be standing. You do not change company to answer the question. That is worth knowing on a support call, because the fastest way to find out why an order did not arrive is to see that the partner has no link in the company it was addressed to.

Setting one up

  1. Create an organisation record in each company that trades, each with its own identifiers.
  2. Create the partner once, with its transport.
  3. Add a link per company and per account: the customer link where they buy, the vendor link where they sell.
  4. Add the agreements once, on the partner.

The wizard will do this for one company. Adding the second and third company means adding links, which is a small job on the card rather than a repeat of the whole setup.