Defining Parent Companies and Dependents

In many cases, you ship and bill customer orders to the same address. However, a customer may have parent/dependent relationships that require that the bill be sent to a different location than the shipping address. For this reason, a customer can have separate ship-to and bill-to records. In the upper right section of the Customer Maintenance window, set up the customer's bill-to and ship-to status as described in the table below.

Note: If you flag the ship-to as ”Separate A/R from Bill To” the ship to invoices will not show up on the parent statements.

If a customer is flagged as a...	send the customer...	and, set up the customer record as...
ship-to only	only the product sold	a ship-to record with assigned bill-to customer. Note: You can set a ship-to only customer's price class to null on the Customer Pricing/Printing window, so that the ship-to inherits the bill to's price class.
bill-to only	only the bill for the product sold	a bill-to record with assigned ship-to customer(s).
bill-to and a ship-to	both the product and the bill	one customer record.

In addition, you can assign parent customers to identify the customer that is financially responsible for the entities that fall underneath it. This parent customer can have multiple dependents linked to it. You must link the parent customer from the dependent customer file.

Note: A parent cannot be unlinked if there has been a cash receipt applied to it on behalf of the bill-to.

Establishing the parent level of the hierarchy allows you to combine accounts receivable and sales information from the child entities to a single parent entity. Linking dependents to a parent customer also allows you to assign credit controls for the parent customer and apply them to the dependent customers in the relationship, post cash receipts to a parent customer, and print a parent customer statement that includes information for billing for the dependent customers. You can also select the parent customer on all major reports.

Use the Parent Statement Customer field Printing tab on the Pricing > Customer Pricing and Printing Options menu from the Customer Maintenance program to assign a parent customer for the dependent customer. By identifying a parent customer, the system produces statements for the parent that includes all open items for all ship-to customers that point to the parent. This statement is broken down with subtotals by ship-to customer. In addition, if you select a parent customer on reports, the system displays information for the parent and all its dependents.

For information about printing parent statements, see Setting Up Parent Statements Print Parametersin the Accounts Receivable documentation.

To assign a parent customer:

From the Maintenance menu, select Customer to display the Customer Maintenance window.
Enter that customer's name in the Customer field for which you want to assign a parent.
From the Pricing menu, select Customer Pricing and Printing Options and click the Printing tab.
In the Parent Statement Customer field, select the customer to be the parent customer.

Note: After you assign a parent customer, the system records the relationship. When you view the parent customer record, the system displays Parent Customer in the status bar.

Save your changes and exit the window.