All business partners need to be maintained in SAP so that they can facilitated execution of transactions. When it comes to managing B2B distributors, industrial customers or government institutions it works great as their numbers are limited. However, there is a challenge when it comes to a business which targets one-time retail buyers.
The sheer number of records to be maintained becomes so high that it leads to explosion of master data records. The number of records become in the same order as the number of transactions in this case. Maintaining a dummy customer master record is not an option as it leads to inaccuracy in calculation of freight and taxes. It can also lead to inaccuracy in shipping and invoicing processes.
Explanation of One Time Customer
Standard SAP provides the functionality of creating one time customers using account group CPD. These account groups are flagged with one-time customer as checked in the account group configuration.
Refer to the screenshots below:
Let us see how the difference between order cycle for a standard SAP customer versus a one-time SAP customer. In the normal case, when an order is placed for a customer, the partner function are defaulted from the customer master record.
However, when you try to create an order for a one-time customer, the addresses need to be provided in the order screen itself. See the screenshot below.
There are a few things to be noted here.
- Same customer master number (in this case 10101) can have different addresses on different orders.
- The customer can have different addresses in Sold To and Bill To of the same order.
- Freight and Tax calculation happen as per the address entered in the order.
- The address details are carried forward to delivery and invoice documents.
Use of One Time Customer
This functionality is useful in cases where you foresee that you will have one time purchase and you don’t want to maintain a customer master record for every single purchase. If you are a retailer or you plan to selling via web store or market place, this feature can help save a lot of time and money for you.
This approach has the following benefits
- Less time setting up and maintaining master data records
- Accuracy in shipping and invoicing.
There is a drawback on using this feature as well. as it all corresponds to a single customer master record, you cannot have customer specific pricing in this case. However, in a B2C scenario, it is highly unlikely that you would have differential pricing for retail buyers.
If you want to integrate SAP ECC with Ecommerce and CRM accounts, get in touch with us.
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