Larry Woo
Senior NetSuite Consultant
At one point or another, every NetSuite customer faces a situation where the need arises to allocate expenses, or any account type, in their GL either as a restate or populating missing financial segments like Department or Class. For the most part, people reach for a standard journal and perform this as needed, over time this ceases to be an exception process and becomes a standard one – where someone tracks in an excel or a report in NetSuite and manually creates the journal. There’s nothing wrong with doing this, but there are alternatives and perhaps one that could save you time at month/year-end.
This is a long-standing feature in NetSuite that allows you to reallocate balances from a source account(s) (including segments) and distribute across destination account(s) (including segments), by creating a journal entry automatically based on a frequency that you define. Some clients of mine don’t take advantage of this feature because there’s a notion that you can only allocate based on a fixed weight that is defined on the schedule. The idea that one had to adjust the schedule each and every period turned folks off from using this as they found it was faster to determine the allocation amounts in excel. But this notion is untrue, there is a way.
Let’s look at this simple example of distributing some overhead expenses that your organization incurs on a monthly basis. When the payable is entered into NetSuite it is booked to an expense account and your general administration department. Let’s say, as part of the departmental budgeting you wish to distribute this overhead expense across them based on the number of employees reporting to that department, where the headcount determines the weight of the allocation. This is possible.
Give it a try, consult SuiteAnswers, and if you’re stuck don’t hesitate to contact one of our highly skilled NetSuite Consultants.
NetSuite
How-to with Woo: Dynamic Allocations in NetSuite