For many organizations, creating customers is a choice driven by the business process at the enterprise. The order processing group initiates the creation of the customer due to a customer related transaction. In this situation, the customer data is entered for use in Order Management to ship material. This same customer is invoiced for the material shipped. However, you can also create a customer in Receivables.
Your organization's business process determines where the customer is created.
Customers are needed to enter any transaction in Order Management—sales orders, quotes, agreements, returns after processing an order, and a return transforms into a receivables transaction—such as an invoice, credit memo, and so on.
There are certain aspects that are managed on the Receivables side of the fence, or to be more precise, in Credit and Collections, where they manage credit limits, payment terms, and other processing and reporting related identification for customers.