So, going through as much history of this feature request, as humanly possible in a very short period of time, this feature has been languishing almost 8 years, despite having a bounty [Feature] Customer and Supplier as one Party [Bounty] · Issue #7538 · frappe/erpnext · GitHub, and many other attempts to workaround or circumvent a very common place business requirement.
To the Frappe/ERPNext team, despite your generous community efforts and excellent coding chops, you are losing business due to the developer mindset. In real life and in business domains, having a “Party” serve as a customer and as a supplier is a very common place scenario. Not only that, many of the prominent accounting softwares and ERP platforms recognise and completely support this scenario. This is further more important, as account reconcilliation also factors both sales and purchases
from the same party, irrespective whether a customer or a supplier.
I hate to compare, but I once was an avid fan of odoo, which integrated this concept very well in the workflows (I recollect odoo calling it “Partner”, and a Partner can be both Customer and/or Supplier). It was only when odoo started getting greedy that I was pushed to search for other options, which is when (around 2014-15) I gave ERPNext a try.
I know it must be quite a task to refactor existing database schema and workflows to integrate this concept, but idling on a business mandated requirement for close to 8 years, is not just ridiculous but also bad business planning on ERPNext’s part, that too despite having paid development bounty.
I’m reminded of this video above, where @rmehta made a very controversial remark “Do We Need Managers?”, which in my personal humble opinion was - putting it politely - “business-immature”, especially coming from MD of Frappe, which offers paid subscriptions for “Enterprise Planning” for business. The above feature and the delay and lack of focus is exactly why managers are required …
I earnestly pray and request to @rmehta to take notice of such glaring roadblocks for new and existing users of such a great offering.