Best Practice Approach for Handling Customers with multiple Addresses

[andre_rieb]

Dear Community,

we are a fairly new SAP S/4 HANA Cloud Customer migrating from a legacy ERP system (not SAP). We are trying to figure out what's best practice with SAP Business Partners. Maybe you can help?

This is the situation:

We merged and migrated our vendors/customers from the legacy system to Business Partners in SAP. Our concept is to have as less Business Partners as possible to keep our Master Data lean and clean. This was a great success from a finance perspective. 

But we have several customers that belong to a legal entity and have multiple addresses and contact persons. We are required to bill to those addresses and contacts directly. A good example is our local city. We have a lot of different relationships to them and provide many different services to different departments of the cities government. 

During data migration, we created a single Business Partner ("the city") and added multiple alternative addresses to it. Now we figured out, that these addresses are not usable in Sales Documents. SAP wrote a note about that: 2528520 (https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2528520)

So we would be required to create a new Business Partner for every single department and contact person of the citys government just to bill to the correct address. If we do that, we can't monitor the transaction volume with the whole city and allocating bank payments is a bit more difficult 😞

How do you handle those customers with multiple billing addresses? Any help and advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Andre

[Stephen_Ward · Accepted solution]

****** Note 2528520 has been updated since this question was raised.

Hello Andre,

Firstly, thank you for providing such a comprehensive explanation of your query and your business case.

I see that you have already found the note 2528520 - Sales Documents Do Not Support Multiple Addresses For A Business Partner (https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2528520), which correctly states that the new Business Partner (BP) functionality in SAP S/4HANA (Both Cloud and OnPremise Editions) allows one BP to have multiple addresses.

This note was updated since your question and now depending your your systems release level there are the following options.

Before S/4HANA 1809

• Create a unique BP for a unique address, and give that BP the correct role (for example, customer). (The multiple address functionality of Business Partner (BP) is not supported in sales documents, the Business Partner's standard address can be used in the document.)

After S/4HANA 1809

• Create multiple customers and assign them to the same BP. For detailed operations, refer to 2706243 Multiple Assignments of Customers/Suppliers to Business Partners in SAP S/4HANA 1809.

Kind Regards,
Stephen

[sven_hertig1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Stephen,

did SAP solve this issue? My use case is nearly the same on my S/4HANA / MDG hub on S/4HANA project at my client. My project is in the public sector. That means that we have to handle the bp type person. A person can have multiple addresses. Sometimes even a temporary address for invoices. There for I do not want to create an additional bp as in the old world. I will controll it with the multiple address assignment functionality from SAP.

How can I solve my issue?

Thanks and

Best regards,

Sven

[Stephen_Ward · Accepted solution]

Hello sven.hertig1,

Thank you for your question. The Note 2528520 has been updated since this question was raised. It depends on your systems release.

Before S/4HANA 1809

• Create a unique BP for a unique address, and give that BP the correct role (for example, customer). <<< (The multiple address functionality of Business Partner (BP) is not supported in sales documents, the Business Partner's standard address can be used in the document.)

After S/4HANA 1809

• Create multiple customers and assign them to the same BP. For detailed operations, refer to 2706243 Multiple Assignments of Customers/Suppliers to Business Partners in SAP S/4HANA 1809. <<< Similar to creating unique customers/suppliers except they can now be part of the same BP
  

Kind Regards,
Stephen

[sven_hertig1 · Accepted solution]

Hello stephen.ward3,

thanks a lot for your quick answer and your answer makes me feel positive. In my use case the bp, customer and supplier will have the same number range. I will create the bp via CR type in the MDG hub (S/4HANA system) and after successfully approving the bp will replicate to the target SAP ERP (S/4HANA system).

Do you have a guide or some instructions how can I create a bp partner with multiple address assignment especially with SAP MDG?

Thanks and

Best regards,

Sven

[sven_hertig1 · Accepted solution]

Addendum:

Hi stephen.ward3,,

following statement I got from another blog post. Can you confirm this?

"Hey Sven, unfortunately I didnt get it running. And in my opinion SAP didnt promote this solution anymore. Obviously this hasent proven in reality. In my projects it was more important to keep numbers equal which is not possible assigning multiple vendors to one business partner.

SAP promised to revise the whole business partner adress handling by the end of 2021. I cant wait to experience a solution to manage different locations of one legal entity withing one business partner. Obviously we have to be patient. :-)"

https://answers.sap.com/questions/13202973/how-to-customizig-multiple-customers-assignment-to.html?c...

Thanks and

Best regards,

Sven

[Stephen_Ward · Accepted solution]

Hi sven.hertig1,

The Multiple Address functionality is supported within the Business Partner, it is the Sales document itself which does not support the Multiple Address functionality of the Business Partner.

The note 2528520 - Sales Documents Do Not Support Multiple Addresses For A Business Partner still stands in terms of its recommended Pre-1809 and Post-1809 approaches.

Best Regards,
Stephen

[former_member132363]

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