How do i do mass maintenance on vendors.

Question

Lets say i have a number of vendors created under 1 company code and 1 pruchasing organization,how can i go about changing these vendors to a new company code and new purchasing organization?

Answer 1

Hello, John.
I see many problems with what you are trying to do. First and foremost: you cannot "change" vendors to a new company code and/or new purchasing org. Table LFB1 contains the Company Code data for vendors and LFM1 contains Purchasing Org data for vendors. The Company Code field (BUKRS) is part of the key to LFB1, and the Purchasing Org field is part of the key to LFM1.
So, you can extend an existing Vendor to a new Company Code (in effect, adding a new record in table LFB1) or to a new Purchasing Org (in effect, adding a new record in table LFM1), but you cannot change an existing record in LFB1 to point to a new Company Code, or an existing record in LFM1 to point to a new Purchasing Org.
If you want to extend existing Vendor Master Records to new Company Codes and/or new Purchasing Orgs, you might consider having a look at transaction MASS (Mass Maintenance of Master Records), I believe there is a Mass Maintenance Object for Vendors. Although, I don't recall whether this object will allow you to create new records.
The second issue that I see has to do with the existing documents for your Vendor. Indeed, if, what you have in mind is to "re-assign" an existing Vendor to a new Company Code or Purchasing Org, the process is quite involved, if the Vendor has postings (Financial AP documents, or MM Purchase Orders, for example) already recorded against it. In that case, you would have to:
- Flag the existing Vendor Master Company Code and/or Purchasing Org records for deletion. This will prevent new postings being made against that Vendor in that Company Code and/or Purchasing Org (or at least, users would receive warnings when trying to post against the "old" Company Code or Purchasing Org);
- Define your Vendor in the new Company Code/Purchasing Org;
- You may also need to transfer the AP Account balance from the old Company Code to the new one, as well as the open items for the Vendor (there you would need to be careful about the "double counting" effect, as your open items will already have been taken into account in the Account Balance). You also need to consider what to do with the open Purchasing Documents (Purchase Orders, Contracts, Purchase Reqs,...), define what other master records to recreate in the new Purchasing Org (Purchasing Info-records, Condition Records, Output records,...);
- Finally, you need to take into consideration the archiving for your Vendor, so that the record for the old Company Code and/or Purchasing Org gets deleted from your system, ultimately.
Even if your Vendor does not have any postings yet recorded in FI (Company Code) and MM (Purchasing Org), the only safe and standard way to get rid of the "unwanted" Company Code and Purchasing Orgs records for that vendor is through archiving (transaction SARA).
In short, your requirement, as described in your question, simply cannot be achieved in SAP without seriously jeopardising the integrity of the existing postings (in FI and MM).