Companies, Customers, and Vendors
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The Sage Network API contains information about three different types of organizations: Companies, Customers, and Vendors. Each of these plays a part in the relationships between business entities and has a different role to play for the account’s financial data.
Types of organizations
Within the Sage Network, there is only one data object, the CompanyModel. A single company can represent either a business owned by the account owner (a “Company”), a business to which the account owner sells products (a “Customer”), or a business that sells products to the account owner (a “Vendor”).
The distinction between these company types can help you to classify company records. If you query the Sage Network API using Query Companies, you can search for companies using the CompanyType field.
| CompanyType | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Company | This company is part of the account holder’s enterprise. Large enterprises may have multiple business entities - for example, a single company might have a separate business entity for each line of business. All business entities that are part of the account holder’s organization are of type Company. |
| Customer | This company is a customer who purchases products from one or more of the account holder’s business entities. |
| Group | This contains information about the account holder’s overall enterprise. There will only be one record within an account holder’s enterprise of type Group. This company object contains information about a generalized view of this account holder. |
| CustomerVendor | This company is both a customer who purchases products from one or more of the account holder’s business entities, as well as a vendor who sells products to one or more of the account holder’s business entities. |
| Vendor | This company is a vendor who sells products to one or more of the account holder’s business entities. |
Hierarchical organizations
Companies can have parents and children. A single company may reflect an organizational unit within a more complex business enterprise.
On each company is a parentCompanyId field and an enterpriseId field. The parentCompanyId field refers to the immediate parent company, and the enterpriseId refers to the top level company. The enterprise parent company will always have parentCompanyId set to null and enterpriseId set to itself.
