Expense Amortization creates an Asset Balance

I am a finance consultant at a publicly traded company trying to help the Accounting Team speed up the monthly close process & reduce the long work hours during close.  To that end, I want to implement expense amortization (Prepaids) here.  The issue is that I can't get the accounting team (or the auditors) to sign off on using the amortization feature because NetSuite immediately creates an asset account for the expense even if the expense (basically the invoice in A/P) has not yet been paid.  "Nothing can be a pre-paid if it hasn't been paid yet"

I'm looking for any guidance or feedback from NetSuite users (especially at a public company) who switched from managing pre-paids in Excel to using the amortization functionality.  Did you face any resistance?  Could you prove mathematically that it wasn't a material change?  Thanks in advance!