Accelerate by Automatically Synchronizing NetSuite Parent to Child Customer Information

This article is relevant if you are using NetSuite’s Sub Customer feature and you need to share information between the parent and the sub customer.

Background

When working with a NetSuite configuration for the customer entity model, NetSuite’s parent-child relationship opens up powerful reporting and other important features. A common situation we see when we service clients in our NetSuite Systems Integration Practice is a parent-child relationship structure to model when a company sells its services to a major retailer and the client wants to track sales at the retail store level — yet they need to accommodate s single bill-to address, common payment terms and preserve overall consolidated credit limits.

NetSuite’s built-in outline (parent-child) reporting, cash applied at the parent level, consolidated accounts receivable balances and collective credit limit features are compelling. Yet, it is important to understand that a sub-customer record is effectively a simple linked structure to a parent reference — and the attributes and field values that a user specifies on the customer sub-record may not logically make sense when the business policy indicates that the parent record values should govern.

Solving for Inheriting Customer Parent Information on the Sub-Customer Record

We had two independent situations where our respective clients asked us to help keep specific information values on customer child sub-records in sync with the parent record.  Instead of tricky saved searches to reach to the child’s parent to get values, especially when trying to work with NetSuite Advanced PDF technologies, we elected to automatically copy information to the child record where it is needed.  This makes the application user-friendly and ensures business policies are adhered to.

Accordingly, using our expertise on the NetSuite platform, we went to work to produce the following:

1. Application Settings: instead of hard coding scripts with values, we built a flexible method to describe an array of fields, sub-records, sub-lists, and address information so that if business requirements change in the future, we would not need to modify the script. Click related image.
2. User Indications of Field Synchronization: when a user is updating a child customer record, we make the fields that are going to be synchronized disabled and inform the user that the values are synchronized from the parent upon save. Click related image.
3. Parent or Child Updates: If a child is updated via an edit record operation, the information from the parent is synchronized. If the parent is updated, the entire tree of child information is synchronized.
4. Override Synchronization: Suppose a child record should not inherit parent values?  By providing a switch on the customer record, we give the user the ability to hold independent values on the child record.

Accelerate your NetSuite Customer Parent / Child Synchronization Situation

The good news is that we were able to build the software and offer it free of license charge to all of our existing clients. We included the sync algorithms in our “Business Process Automation” accelerator bundle. Naturally, these algorithms can be refined for specific use cases not previously contemplated.

If you found this article helpful, feel free to receive notifications of new articles as I publish them. If you would like to get control of your NetSuite customer attribute synchronization challenge, let’s have a conversation.

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.

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