Setting up
Partners
A partner is the company you exchange documents with. The record ties who they are on the wire to who they are in your ledger.
The partner record is short on purpose: a code, a description, whether it is enabled, and a transport. Everything else about the relationship hangs off it as links and agreements.
The links are the interesting part
A partner is not a customer, and it is not a vendor. It is a company that might be both, in more than one of your legal entities, under more than one identifier. That is what a partner link records.
| On the link | What it says |
|---|---|
| Company | Which of your legal entities this applies in |
| Account module | Customer or vendor |
| Account number | Which account in that company |
| Identifier type and value | The number they are addressed by, for this link |
| Address | Which of their addresses this identifier stands for |
A grocery chain that buys from you and also invoices you for marketing is one partner with two links: a customer link and a vendor link. A chain that buys into four warehouses under four GLNs is one partner with four links, all pointing at the same customer account.
The partner card
Opening a partner shows the agreements, the transport, the links, and two panels that answer the question people actually have: which customer accounts and which vendor accounts does this partner trade under, across every company. You do not have to change company to find out.
The wizard
Setting a partner up by hand means touching four kinds of record in the right order. The wizard does the same work in one pass: it asks who the partner is, which identifiers they use, which accounts they map to, how the documents travel, and which documents you have agreed to exchange. It creates the partner, the links, the transport and the agreements together, so you cannot end up with a partner that has no way to send anything.
Use it for a new partner. Use the card for changing one that exists.
The profile the service knows about
Some of what you set up here has to be known on our side too, so that an arriving document can be identified before Dynamics has seen it. The partner record therefore keeps track of when its profile was last published and what it looked like when it was.
That happens by itself. What it means for you is that a change to identifiers or transport takes effect once it has been published, not the instant you press save, and the card tells you which state it is in.
Turning a partner off
Disabling a partner stops new documents in both directions and leaves everything that already happened intact. It is the right move when a relationship ends, and a better one than deleting, which would leave old messages pointing at nothing.