Resolve one Business Partner master into role-aware parties, normalise sales and purchase document flows into target business events, and carry open commitments across the boundary without losing pricing or tax intent.
Trade is where the migration meets the people who use the system every day. Finance and inventory decisions are made in workshops; trade decisions are felt at a sales desk and a goods-in bay on the first Monday after go-live.
The source model is economical: one record, one code, whatever roles that organisation happens to play. The target model is deliberate: a party in the global address book, with customer and vendor roles attached where relevant, and the party carrying the shared identity.
The source chain — quotation, sales order, delivery, A/R invoice, with credit memos and returns alongside — has a clear target counterpart: sales order, confirmation, packing slip, invoice.
The purchase chain — purchase order, goods receipt PO, A/P invoice — maps to purchase order, product receipt and vendor invoice. The accounting separation is the important part, and the posting crosswalk covers it in depth; the trade design has to make it operationally workable.
Source estates accumulate price lists, special prices per business partner, discount groups, quantity breaks and period discounts. Layers are added and rarely removed. The result is a configuration that looks sophisticated and, in practice, resolves most orders through two or three rules.
The principle: carry the outstanding commitment, not the document's history. Inventory movements load through the inventory wave; receivables and payables balances load through the finance wave. Reconstructing a document's fulfilment history double-counts both.
Approval behaviour in this estate is rarely where the design expects it. It can live in approval procedures, in user queries supplying the condition, in formatted searches that block or default entry, or in SBO_SP_TransactionNotification, which can reject a transaction at the database boundary with no visible configuration behind it.
The source validation set names what must reconcile, and the trade workstream owns two of the five:
One Business Partner becomes a party with roles, and identity resolution is a commercial decision that must precede master creation. Customer and vendor groups follow the posting crosswalk, not the source grouping convention.