This article is relevant if you seek to work with NetSuite purchase orders in foreign currency.
Background
Recently, a new client seeking to optimize their accounting and purchase operations wanted to understand what options were available to help them manage purchase orders in foreign currency. Their existing practice was to maintain spreadsheets of prices in foreign currency as their understanding was that NetSuite only offered holding purchase prices in base currency on the item definition. I offered some help with standard NetSuite capacities as well as an innovation we produced for others clients.
NetSuite’s Offering for Item Purchase Prices in Foreign Currency
NetSuite offers a mechanism to record purchase prices in foreign currency through the Vendor part sublist feature. See accompanying image. The assumption is that suppliers have different price offerings based in a currencies for which they sell.
This mechanism generally works well. However, there may be cases where you don’t want to maintain a foreign currency price list against vendors. Instead, you simply want to maintain the foreign currency purchase price in general. Here, you are challenged to become more creative.
Introducing Item Versions
In our freight container work to solve advanced supply chain logistics, we created an item version concept to support connections to landed cost templates to drive flexible inventory capitalization. See article Finally: Capitalize NetSuite Inventory Costs with Item Consumption Landed Costs for more information.
Within that model, we offer an item version concept; think of the item version as a variant of the standard item. The concept is flexible to drive various kinds of use models that NetSuite native does not support. The item version works within a particular currency because when used in an advanced mode, it must perform the proper accounting for landed cost operations during item receiving.
Yet, in simple mode, you can use item versions to present a different purchase price by currency without respect for supplier. See related image.
When creating a purchase order, the item version will come forth respecting the transaction currency and present a list of purchase prices that are available for the desired item. It does not require a reference connection to the supplier giving you freedom to use that price across vendors. When used in purchase operations, the purchase order will use the item version to gather its foreign currency price. See related image.
Get the Item Version for Foreign Currency Prices
The concept is relatively simple to understand. Much of the innovation can be recreated using the point-and-click customization features of NetSuite. It gets tricky though overriding the price on the user interface and when the record is saved; supporting scripts make the solution complete. Here again is another great example of the use of the NetSuite platform to meet business requirements. We offer the item version concept, like we do all of our software algorithms, without charge to our clients. See this bundle definition. If you see how item versions can help your organization, perhaps we can have a conversation?
See Related Articles
Marty Zigman
Holding all three official certifications, Marty is regarded as the top NetSuite expert and leads a team of senior professionals at Prolecto Resources, Inc. He is a former Deloitte & Touche CPA and has held CTO roles. For over 30 years, Marty has produced leadership in ERP, CRM and eCommerce business systems. Contact Marty to set up a conversation.
More Posts - Website - Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - YouTube
