One-time Customer in SAP SD

Use

With some customers your company has long-lasting business relationships. You have special price agreements with these customers and deliveries are given preferential treatment. At the end of the fiscal year you might honor the reliability of these customers with rebate payments. With other customers you might have only one contact. In the SAP R/3 System you can distinguish between:

• Customers
• One-time customers

Customer

You create a customer master record for every customer. In the standard version of the SAP R/3 System you can choose between the partner functions sold-to party, ship-to party, bill-to party, and payer. For further information on partner functions, see "Partners in the Customer Master Record".

One-time Customer

Customers who only enter into a business transaction with you once are called one-time customers in the SAP R/3 System. It is not necessary to create a customer master record for these customers, since there remains no need for this master record after the business transaction has been carried out, and it would only require unnecessary storage space.

Collective Master Records for One-time Customers

You create a collective master record for all one-time customers. A collective master record refers to a dummy customer and includes only the data that is identical for a certain group of customers.

You can create, for example, a collective master record for all customers of a certain region. This master record would include fields such as a name to identify the master record, the language, the currency and the sales office processing the customer data. If a one-time customer from this region orders goods from your company you will use the customer number of your collective master record when processing the sales order. Only in the sales order itself will you enter the address and all other data not given in the master record.

Screens and Fields for One-time Customers

When you create a customer master record for a one-time customer, the account group CPD (account group for one-time customers) is automatically proposed. This ensures that the screens from different areas (sold-to party, ship-to party, bill-to party, payer) relevant for one-time customers, are accessed. However, only fields which can be identical for all one-time customers are displayed. For example, all address fields are suppressed, since the master record is collective for data of several customers.

On the following screens you can enter a limited amount of data in a master record for one-time customers:

• Address
• Sales
• Shipping
• Billing document
• Output

The account group can restrict the number of screens accessed in the master record for one-time customers even further. If only some of the screens and fields for one-time customers are relevant for your company, ask your system administrator to change the account group CPD or to set up a new account group.

For further information on creating a customer master record for a one-time customer, see Creating a Customer Master Record.