What Parties are

Every order is placed by someone and fulfilled by someone. Every invoice is sent by one business to another. In Supply Lens, those businesses are Parties. In this lesson you will learn what a Party is for, meet the special Party that represents you, and see how shared Parties work.

What a Party is for

A Party represents a unique business entity your organisation exchanges data with: a wholesaler you sell to, a supplier you buy from, a retailer, a marketplace, a 3PL.

With a Party in place you can:

• Recognise it on incoming Documents, by giving it the identifiers other systems use for it, such as a GLN or the customer code it has in your ERP;
• Route Documents for it, for example a Mapping that only runs for one customer;
• Price for it, with customer-specific prices on your Products;
• Scope Product and Location identifiers to it, so a code only applies on its Documents.

The organisation party: you

Every organisation has an organisation party, created automatically. It holds the core information about your own business: company name, description, address and identifiers.

On the Parties list, a small building icon to the left of the name shows which Party is the organisation party.

Your organisation party matters most when partners identify you. A retailer that sends you EDI orders addresses them to the code it uses for you. If your organisation party carries that code, Supply Lens knows the order is for you.

Shared Parties

Parties can belong to just your organisation, or be shared across organisations. Shared Parties are managed at system level by Supply Lens so their information stays correct and consistent, such as a large retailer that many Supply Lens customers trade with. Shared Parties show a shared party icon on the Parties list.

You can still add your own organisation-level identifiers to a shared Party. Where your own identifier and a shared one compete, yours wins.

Party identifiers at a glance

Party identifiers are the codes, IDs, numbers and references used to identify a Party, such as:

• GLN (a global location number, used widely in EDI);
• VAT;
• Shopify Company ID;
• Unleashed Customer Code or Unleashed Supplier Code;
• Customer Assigned Code and Supplier Assigned Code.

A Party can have many identifiers, and the Identifiers column on the Parties list shows how many each one has. You will add them in the Party identifiers lesson.

Finding Parties

Open Settings → Reference data → Parties to see your Parties. Search by name at the top of the list to go straight to one, or use the top-bar search (/) with a name or a code such as a GLN or VAT number. Open a Party to see its full details and the identifiers it is known by.