Merging of duplicate Business Partner instances?

[harsh_shrotriya]

Hi,

As my understanding goes, Business ByDesign is "pro-active" rather than "reactive" to duplicate instances of Business Partner instances like Accounts, Suppliers. What this means is that we can do a duplicate check when creating a new instance of lets say a Private/Corporate Account to avoid duplicating the data. This is good.

However, is there any solution to merge duplicate accounts/suppliers, once they have skipped the check at the time of creation?

If there are documents that have been posted against these business partners, I understand that it makes the story more complex and can perhaps be the reason why we don't allow merging after wards but, would like to hear some thoughts on this.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Harsh Vardhan Shrotriya

[Mugesh · Accepted solution]

Hi Harsh,

Merging of duplicate Business Partner instances - Do you mean that "Duplicate check" for Supplier name should also check the Account name?

Regards,

Mugesh

[harsh_shrotriya · Accepted solution]

Hi Mugesh,

I understand that the cross business partner check (Account vs Supplier and vice versa) is already there.

I wanted to understand what happens if someone still manages to create duplicate business partners in ByD system, either by ignorance or silly mistake.

Is there any way for us to merge such records? Does it make sense to allow such a merge to happen? What happens if there are transactions carried out for such business partners already in the system?

Thanks and regards,

Harsh Vardhan Shrotriya

[marlene_katzschner · Accepted solution]

Hi Harsh

the discussion of mergin duplicate business partners we hear from time to time. Due to the impact and follow up discussions e.g.

• What happens with open invoices (Invoices cannot be reposted, they need to be reversed and recreated)
• What happens with cleared items? Do you want to merge them as well? Otherwise you do not see them in the statistics?
• Also the POs and SOs and the impact on payment behaviour, delivery etc.
• ...

Do to this open questions and the fact that we do not have an "out of the box" answer, we usually suggest to the customers to change the name of the obsolete BP to "obsolete". Then ensure that the new transactions go to the correct Business Partner (e.g. remove bank data from the obsolete partner will avoid automatic processing).

Hope that clarifies your question.

Best regards and thanks

Marlene

[harsh_shrotriya]

Thanks for your feedback Marlene. I had the same impression.