[1] The most commonly found categories of master data are parties (individuals and organisations, and their roles, such as customers, suppliers, employees), products, financial structures (such as ledgers and cost centres) and locational concepts.
There exist edge cases where an organization may need to treat certain transactional processes and operations as "master data".
[3] An alternative definition of the term master data is that it represents the business objects that contain the most valuable, agreed upon information shared across an organization.
It can cover relatively static reference data, transactional, unstructured, analytical, hierarchical and metadata.
All aspects of an organisation, operational and analytical, are greatly dependent on the quality of an organization's master data.