Party Overview

Party is the collective term for companies such as customers, suppliers and TO’s. Party Group is a non-company specific party. Party groups are usually used for countries, sometimes for regulatory rules and differ from the other parties by having no contact details, account managers or attachments.

You can use ‘Search for Parties’ to see which parties you have on your system. You can add new parties in Add a New Customer / Supplier / TO. View or modify parties in View or Modify a Customer / Supplier / TO. Parties have several tabs, more about these below:

Key Details: A Party can include key contact information such as company name, address, telephone number, contact name, email address.

Contacts: On the ‘Contacts’ tab, you can add multiple contacts. To help manage the different types of contacts, use ‘Contact roles’. The first contact you add defaults to be the ‘Primary’ contact for the party.

About Contact roles: The primary contact is the default when sending documents. This is important e.g. when emailing a document the email address to send to is collected from the email address of the primary contact of the company. You can add new contact roles directly in the software.

Account Managers: These relate to Roles or Users at your company. For example, you can have an account manager type ‘Technical Document Account Manager’, and assign a specific user as the Technical Document Account Manager for a specific customer.

Attachments: Parties can contain attachments, for example you can upload company policies on sales or on ingredient use.

Related Parties: Parties can also reflect relationships through ‘Related Parties’, including commercial relationships such parent company or division, and technical relationships which may reflect shared regulatory requirements.

About Related Parties: Related Parties are either belonged to or belonging. It can be thought of in the following way:

Customer A
has ‘Parties Belonged To’: Parent Company A
This means Customer A belongs to Parent Company A, and inherits rules (suitability checks) from Parent Company A
has ‘Companies Belonging’: Customer B
This means Customer A has a derivative company, Customer B, to whom rules are donated.

Suitability Checking can relate to parties or party groups, and be applied to Documents.