Item receipts and bills are both linked to their related PO. This works fine when there are only one or two receipts for a PO. However, when the number grows to five or ten receipts it becomes exponentially more difficult to figure out which goes with which. Compounding the problem is NetSuite's willingness to allow an item receipt and a bill to have different quantities and/or prices when they are for the same thing. Why should these differ you ask? Quantity can vary because of count variances (vendor counts 10,000 widgets, you count 9,993), lot size variances (estimate 10 PCB's from a standard lot size, but the actual yield is 11 PCB's), etc. Prices can vary because purchasing mis-keyed a price, purchasing used an old price while the current price is higher, lot size variances (flat charge for lot, regardless of yield), etc.
This causes the notorious inventory received not billed account to be very difficult to reconcile, messes up inventory costs, allows 3-way matching errors. NetSuite forces all 3-way matching to be manual, which inevitably leads to errors like the $1,800 overpayment and the $5,000 inventory overstatement that inspired me to write this post.
What's the solution? Give interested customers the option to force bills to be linked to item receipts, not allow the quantity or unit price to differ between linked bills and receipts, and not allow multiple bills to be linked to a single item receipt or vice versa. This means the system (NetSuite) forces all bills to be matched to an item receipt and I don't have to rely on alert employees to prevent mistakes.
- Miguel
