Comment 42 for bug 1160365

Raphaël's last comment summarizes the correct solution. Without an explicit link between business documents and the company partner, OpenERP makes pretty basic reporting such as grouping sales orders by company partners next to impossible using only official modules. There would be a common need for an additional field for the 'commercial entity', which is doable in custom modules but which would effectively swap the semantics between partner_id and contact_address_id in OpenERP < 7.0 and partner_id and commercial_entity_id in OpenERP 7.0 and up. This is an unnecessary and damaging change that is going to cause many regressions in many official and community modules.

By furthermore copying the relevant data from the company parter to its contacts OpenERP is making a dangerous move just to try and maintain data integrity, which would not be necessary when applying the two fields approach.

@Fabien I yet have to hear approval for your approach from any established OpenERP partner or other stakeholders. If the partners that do speak up all disapprove, they can not all be wrong.