What is importance of Account group in customer code create?

Question

Dear Experts,
                         whlie creating customer code we have difference types of Account group , what is  the importance ? what is mean by bill- to party , sold-to party . i am very new to SD please guide me
regards
rajakarthik.

Answer 1

Hi Raja
First, try to understand "Customer".
"Customer" is actually one type of Business Partner.
If you will tell simply "Customer", then it does not make a complete sense to me, as in business, I will be interested to know, which "Customer" you are talking about.
Beacuse, there are four types of Customer. The Customer Partner type is categorised as per the function performed by them.
The Customer, who places order is called -- SP (Sold-to-party),
the Customer who receives the goods is called -
SH (Ship-to-party),
who receives the Bill is called -- BP (Bill-to-party) and
who makes the payment is called --- PY (Payer).
SP, SH, BP and PY are called "Partner Function" (i.e. Function performed by the Partner "Customer").
If you will take the example of a small business, you will find, the same person is placing the order, receiving the goods, receiving the bill and making the payment also. That means, he is performing the role for all the functions SP,SH,BP and PY.
But, if you will go for a big Corporate, you may find all four may be different. For example, Delhi office is the SP, Mumbai office is SH, Kolkata office is PY & Chennai office is BP.
All the 4 Partner functions are mandatory in a sales process, they may be performed by one partner or by four different partners.
As all the above Partner Functions are mandatory, they need to exist in the system as a Customer. A customer exist only when a master data is created for him.
ACCOUNT GROUP
You must have seen ,when Billing document is saved, there is posting takes place in Accounting.
A Debit posting to Customer account and credit posting to Revenue account. It indicates that, Customer is also considered as an "Account" in FI.
So, a group of Account (customer) behaving in a similar manner are one "ACCOUNT GROUP". Those different Account Groups are normally created in FI. There are various Account groups like 0001(Sold-to-party), 0002(Ship-to-party) etc, and you can create your own also.
When you create a Customer, system needs to know, what type of Customer (Account) you are going to create. System gets this information through "Account Group". If you want to create a Customer who will work as a Payer, then you need to choose the Account Group "Payer" and not '0002- Ship-to-party".
A "Payer" needs the billing and Payment related information, he does not require Shipping related information. Hence, the Shipping tab is not found totally in the customer master of a "Payer". Similarly, those fields which are not required for a particular type of customer, they are suppresed (made invisible).
Which fields will be mandatory, optional, suppressed & display purpose only, are decided/ controlled by the Account group and this is what we call "Field selection" which is controlled by Account group (one controlfunction of Account Group).
Similarly, when we save a Customer master, the customer number (either internal or external) comes from the "Number range" which has been assigned to the Account group. There are few other functions which are also controlled by the Account group like whether "One-time customer" default output etc.
That means without specifying an "Account Group", you can not create a Customer as now you know, Account group controls the Customer master data.
Hope, this explanation will create your doubts in a simpla manner.
Regards
Edited by: pradyumna on Oct 24, 2009 6:55 PM