Field "Trading partner" in the master data and reporting

[Mariya_Yanush]

Last Review: 09th June 2020, release 2005

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Trading Partners

In SAP, separate entities under the same parent company are defined with different company codes. In order to perform intercompany transactions in SAP, you must also define a trading partner on every transaction. A trading partner represents the company code that is in transaction with your company code.

Intercompany Business Partners

Intercompany transactions can be done at either a general ledger account or a sub-ledger level. Typically, as legal invoices are required between companies for certain types of transactions (outside of a cross-charge, miscellaneous billing, or allocation), companies choose to perform the majority of their intercompany transactions at the subledger level.

Customer and vendor accounts for trading partners

Trading partner can be filled in App Maintain Business Partners under role Customer/Supplier->General Data-> Control tab (in German: Partnergesellschaft Nummer; technical field name VBUND).

If the company code is not yet implemented in S4HC then the trading partners shall be maintained by SAP Support via ticket (component XX-S4C-SRV-CON). A special template should be filled specifying ID number, address and currency of trading partner.

General ledger accounts

If you want to use G/L accounts directly, instead of customer and vendor accounts, for the entry of receivables and payables you can also enter the trading partner into the G/L account master record used for direct posting on the balance sheet. It is not a common approach though.

List of Reports including field Trading Partner

App Market Segments – Actuals, App Market Segment - Plan/Actual

App Journal Entry Analyzer

App Display line items in General Ledger

App Manage Customer Line Items and App Manage Supplier Line Items

Also, other Design studio reports contain this field:

App P&L – Actuals, App P&L - Plan/Actual, App Trial Balance

App Cost Centers – Actuals, Cost Center - Plan/Actual

App Profit Centers – Actuals, Profit Center - Plan/Actual

App Functional Areas – Actuals, App Functional Area - Plan/Actual

App Projects – Actuals, App Project - Plan/Actual