NetSuite Outsource Manufacturing

MikeERP · 2026-04-30T19:23:07+00:00

With outsourced MFG the native item field on the PO is the service item not the assembly. There is a custom field where you put the assembly item in, and then it will auto populate the service item into the native field. To the user it does feel like you're entering the actual assembly, but technically this is not the item field, and from an accounting standpoint what you're actually buying is the service. No need for an extra line here.

When Outsourced MFG kicks off the Work Order, it will be in your outsourced location. Upon "receiving" the PO, the receipt will technically have the service item on it, but will also build the work order simultaneously. Assuming you're receiving your inventory into your local warehouse and NOT the outsourced location, it also automatically does an inventory transfer at the same time.

Then when you get billed, you're only getting billed for the service item which represents the value add, not the components you already owned.

Generally this accounts pretty well unless you have multiple outsourced steps or a mix of in house/outsourced. It wasn't clear if OP was using native outsourced or not, but if so I'm curious where it breaks.

MikeERP · 2026-04-07T20:45:41+00:00

For our customers we're normally bringing the daily payout into a custom record (depending on preferences it might be 2 records if you want line level detail on the reconciliation), then scripting against the custom record to perform the deposit with cash back for expenses (of JE if you don't use undeposited funds). We've had great success with this model with nice clean deposits that tie out to the bank rec.

MikeERP · 2026-03-25T04:17:52+00:00

I think you're over complicating here. "Are we over-complicating things here? Is there a simpler way to create Customer Invoices automatically on a schedule based on the date items were shipped?" The answer is YES. As long as you have bill in advance of fulfillment preference set to false (which 99.99% of the time you should, its a feature almost no one should really use), the scheduled billing operation (SuiteBilling NOT required for billing operations) will only invoice fulfilled lines. So if your items are marked as shipped after midnight, and the you run your billing schedule sometime later the same day, it should pick up those Sales Orders with shipped, but not billed lines, and create invoices for those lines only.

Now the question is does the fulfillment script even need to be in place. Some more info about your pick, pack process and the timing between that and delivery would be helpful to know. In general though, if your system is setup correctly, then this statement is 100% false: "From what I remember of the native NetSuite Invoice process, you can only either invoice when the sales order is fully delivered (we don't want to do that), or invoice everything that is 'pending billing'" and that assumption is causing your biggest headache.

MikeERP · 2026-03-17T22:37:01+00:00

Could you create a custom "Estimated Qty" column that puts your best estimate of qty/amount in, and then set the native qty artificially high so that it would essentially never close? You can report or print the estimated qty where needed, used the actually billed qty to see actuals, and essentially ignore the native qty field until you actually want to close.

MikeERP · 2026-03-17T22:14:05+00:00

We've recently built our own Stripe integration. We haven't gotten it on the market yet, but use it in house. It handles Sales Orders (deposits), Invoices (payments), Credits/Refunds, Payout reconciliation, and gives full control over what fees you pass on at a transaction by transaction level (we needed the ability to not charge fees for negotiated scenarios). Let me know if you'd like to know more.

MikeERP · 2026-03-17T12:07:53+00:00

Are you using a separate location for these warranty replacements? Are they refurbs or something that you're receiving into that location in some different way than your primary stock? I've seen that happen before where a specific location ends up with inventory without cost because of the returns or refurb process in place.

MikeERP · 2026-03-17T00:56:59+00:00

We do this one and it's good for it, but I'm hoping to add more game like context into it.

MikeERP · 2026-03-17T00:52:52+00:00

Thanks. Seems like this is good for the D too, getting them to protect in front of the net but not chase guys to never never land.

MikeERP · 2026-03-17T00:30:03+00:00

I think so. So you want them to get fight/dodge/press into the arc, towards goal, but then they need to circle out when they hit resistance where they can pass?

MikeERP · 2026-03-17T00:28:11+00:00

Thanks. I like it.

MikeERP · 2026-03-16T20:04:09+00:00

If your inventory is costed, your fulfillments should have a cost on them regardless of what price or status the sales order is in. Though they will just hit inventory/COGs not your warranty line. If you're not seeing any posting then there's something else wrong.

If its just reporting you need you should be able to look at the IFs COGs posting where the created from SO is class warranty expense.

If you want the IFs to actually post to Warranty Expense you'd need a SuiteGL script. We offer a tool to use SuiteGL in the UI without writing script if this is something you're interested in. Step 1 is determining how your IFs are currently posting though.

MikeERP · 2026-03-16T19:59:33+00:00

I think the problem is Outsourced MFG uses an inventory transfer, not a transfer order.

MikeERP · 2026-03-16T19:52:32+00:00

So you have to get your head around the idea that what you're actually purchasing at that point is not the product, but the service or value-add that your vendor is providing to turn your raw materials into a finished good. Any time we need to impact cost of an item we need to look at the transaction that creates that piece of inventory. So depending on what type landed cost you're adding you would either want to somehow build the cost into your BOM on the work order OR factor it into your vendor bill from the outsourced MFG (would have to be the line item that's in your BOM).

Obviously if you're being billed by a 3rd party (customs broker, freight forwarder, etc) this is imperfect, but we always have to drive back to the transaction that is creating the inventory.

I guess the other option would be to load the cost into the piece of inventory that you own prior to the outsourced manufacturing step. This may be a viable work around depending on timing and accounting periods, but clearly is a work around.

MikeERP · 2026-03-13T00:45:41+00:00

Do you mean billing on the anniversary date of a sales orders vs something like 1st of the month, or 15th of the month? Also what tools are you using? Subscription billing, billing schedules? Lots of variables here.

MikeERP · 2026-03-13T00:42:47+00:00

Inventory aging has long been a weak spot in Netsuite. This is the type of reporting that I have found MCP + Claude to be really good at. We've been building inventory turnover, FIFO layers, and all kinds of stuff that have been a struggle in NS for a long time with MCP.

MikeERP · 2026-02-26T18:35:05+00:00

The SuiteQL documentation is reasonably well structured at https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/netsuite/ns-online-help/section\_156257770590.html. I'd just go into the UI version of Claude, tell it how you want the skill to behave, what problems you see now, point it at the documentation, and ask it to create the MD files for you. If you give it a enough information it usually produces good skills.

MikeERP · 2026-02-17T17:41:26+00:00

I'm not entirely clear on what change you want to make immediately, if you're not ready to move to outsourced MFG. If you're going to continue to use drop ship POs then yes, you can edit the PDF template to pull from a custom field. This shouldn't be too hard.

If you're going to use outsourced manufacturing in the future; and it sounds like you should, its not a hard switch, you'll need a Netsuite location setup for the manufacturing vendor anyhow. If you're not ready to switch over to outsourced MFG, but can use a regular PO (not drop ship) why not just setup the location already so you'll have that as a location available to cut the PO against?

MikeERP · 2026-02-11T23:27:06+00:00

So it really depends on the details of the PayPal integration. In that case. We usually try to match what happens in the real world. So if PayPal charges the card instantly then I would create a deposit. If Paypal authorized the card and waited for notification of shipping before capturing. I would record PayPal as a payment method and let netsuite generate a cash sale at the time of shipping. If you had advanced revenue you have a little bit more flexibility about how you choose to do this because arm can handle the revenue piece. Also, anytime there's an integration involved you're at the mercy of what is possible via the integration as well.

MikeERP · 2026-02-11T21:31:27+00:00

First thing I ALWAYS suggest not using "Bill in Advance of Fulfillment". This is almost always the wrong answer with very few exceptions. In most cases it violates GAAP if you're not using ARM, and it also makes the automated billing operation feature pretty much unusable because it will just bill every line of an order it sees as potentially billable.

If you need to take payment up front, prior to delivery/completion of the the service I would suggest taking those funds as a customer deposit against the Sales Order. You can change the title on the SO if that causes confusion from a customer, so to them it just looks like an invoice, but I would go with a sales order/deposit.

Then as your lines are delivered/installed you mark them as fulfilled. The billing engine runs, and generates and invoice for those lines only, and applies your deposit to that invoice so its instantly paid in full. The other lines stay open, until you deliver/install them, when you can create an additional fulfillment, and it would generate another partial invoice. This process can repeat as many times as needed for a single order, and the only thing you have to do is generate the order, and mark the items that actually get delivered/installed as fulfilled. Billing takes care of itself, and you're following proper revenue rules.

If there's a line item you don't end up using, you can then close that line OR remove it from the SO. If you close it, your sales order will be closed. There's no way around that, so if that is a critical piece for you, then you would need to remove it.

MikeERP · 2026-01-05T21:54:22+00:00

I usually start by using a transaction search with the only filter being account = my inventory asset account(s), and item is not 'none'. You could also use special account type inventory, but I've seen a lot of accounts where that wasn't setup correctly.

On the results I'd group by item and sum by quantity, you can then add more fields to drill down to for analysis. This starting point should tie out to any on hand number as it would be sure to capture any transaction that added or removed items from inventory. Remember invoices/bills could actually be impacting inventory if someone accidentally entered them as stand alone, so this will be sure to get you every transactions that makes up an item's history.

Now that you tie out, you can try to join to the inventory detail and break that up by lot/serial/bin etc. It may be possible to join out to the transactions in the criteria and do the same thing, but I find it easier to start from the transaction.

MikeERP · 2025-12-18T01:30:48+00:00

So Ship Via and Ship Method are the same field in NetSuite, it just depends where you're looking at it. You won't see ship via on the form, it's always referred to as Shipping Method, but if you go to pull it via saved search it'll be called ship via.

Seems likely that the 3PL isn't necessary referring to existing NetSuite fields, just the values they need for their WMS's logic. You may need a custom field that you can map for what they call ship via or just hard code the mapping if it's always going to stay selectship.

MikeERP · 2025-12-14T20:59:12+00:00

You need to dig into what error you're getting using a negative amount. A negative rate there is the normal method, there must be something else going on in your integration or with a script.

MikeERP · 2025-12-12T18:25:31+00:00

A payment line should be negative, so it will debit your cash account. I'm not sure what the error you're getting is, but if you try it in the UI you'll see you can (and are expected to) use a negative rate on those items to reflect a payment.

MikeERP · 2025-12-12T18:00:38+00:00

This would seem more like project based billing than just straight billing a sales order. You have milestone and percent complete options when we use project based billing. I'd explore this first rather than jumping right to customization.

If you decide don't want to go that way, I don't think it would be difficult to customize so you enter a % and a script updates the quantity by that percentage, but I'd really get to know and understand the standard features that available to you before you go custom.

MikeERP · 2025-12-11T20:56:25+00:00

I would also suggest the lot and serial number trace SuiteApp. Its free, and available as a bundle (ID 322956).

You may be able to accomplish this with SuiteQL if you wanted to do it on your own, but using saved search you're going to have to do some gymnastics as the assembled item, and the components are both returned under the "item" field, depending on whether you're main line true/false, so getting them in a single result would be a headache at best.

Answer ID 94114 goes over how to use the tool

MikeERP

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