What’s a manual address in sales documents?

[former_member131745]

The purpose of this document is to help clarify the behavior of the standard system with regards to manual addresses in sales documents.

When creating a sales document; i.e. a sales order, the address of the partner is copied from the customer master data. Technically just a link to this address data is created in the database. This means, if you update the customer master record, for example to change the street name, all related sales documents will have the updated address. This saves you from entering all sales orders and updating each address should you ever need to modify a customer address. However, this also means that old complete orders now have the updated address data too. Some users do not want this behavior and would prefer to know the address that was used when the order was created and not the new address. However, the system was designed with the intention that customer master records would not be changed. If the customer has a new address, then a new customer master record should be created.

Advantages:

Incorrect address data can be changed in one central place (customer master record) and all referenced documents are updated without the need for updating all sales orders one by one.

Duplicate address data does not need to be stored for each sales order saving space on the database.

Most of the confusion occurs when a manual address is entered for a sales document.

A manual address is an address that has been changed in the sales document. A link to the corresponding customer master address is no longer enough as these manual changes would be then lost and obviously, we do not want to update the customer master address from a sales order. If a manual change has been done in an address the system creates a new manual address.

When you create a document, with reference to a document with a manual address, this changed manual address is copied to the follow-up document. This makes sense because if you create a quotation for a customer with a manually changed address, then logically the sales order created with reference to this quotation should have the same address. All further changes to the address will also impact the other documents in the chain.

In Summary:

In the standard system the following is correct behavior:

Create a sales document and change the address so that it becomes a manual address. Save the document.

In a document created with reference to the first document, change the address again and save.

See now that both documents have the same subsequent address. No new manual address number is issued on the change of address on any subsequent documents. The original manual address indicator will be retained for all linked documents.