A trading partner attribute is a way of grouping trading partners for reporting or to store information against a trading partner.
Trading partners may have categories assigned to them in your business, such as ‘Bathroom’ or ‘Kitchen’ trading partners. Storing this information in a trading partner attribute would allow you to view this information against a trading partner, search and report on the trading partners based upon these categories.
Trading partner attributes can be found displayed in the list of trading partners next to the trading partner reference as shown below, where 'Buying Group' and 'Division' are two attributes.
You can also set user permissions based upon these attributes. This may be useful if you want to restrict members of your team to only be able to edit/read certain categories of trading partners.