This article is relevant if you need to produce a true NetSuite inventory aging.
Background
Recently, another professional in the NetSuite community started a broadcast Telegram NetSuite Channel to publish NetSuite tips and other useful information. If you use Telegram as a chat application, I recommend joining this channel as Tiru Chembeti (@Tiru2u NetSuite SME & Sr. Solution Architect) is adding tips weekly; he is offering a great community service and I appreciate his efforts.
Recently, he produced a post that indicated “An alternative way to create Inventory aging report through transactions Saved Searches”. This was curious to me as I understood NetSuite had no native Inventory Aging reports. Click the image for the suggested transaction search definition.
NetSuite SuiteAnswers #75940, Enhancement #44650
As I reviewed the solution, I gave it some consideration; I could see how the solution offer advanced saved search bucketing with transaction dates. I then reached out to Boban D., a Senior Analyst on our team, to have a discussion. Boban and I solved the NetSuite Aging challenge in 2018. Boban prepared a table to help explain the differences between NetSuite’s offered Saved Search and our concept of an Inventory Aging. Click the image to see the differences in approach.
I then dug further and suspect that the source of the information Tiru supplied likely was gathered from NetSuite’s SuiteAnswers #75940. As of this writing, there is still an outstanding NetSuite Enhancement #44650 to produce the Inventory Aging.
NetSuite Inventory Aging vs. Transaction Activity Analysis
The key to inventory aging is to think in terms of how much inventory is still on hand and simply sitting. Depending on the costing model defined (as a proxy for the real-life work of inventory receiving and shipping), assess how old that inventory has been on hand in terms of the number of days. Shape that information into aging buckets.
Once you have the aging buckets, you can then make some assessments about possible inventory obsolescence. Good inventory practices suggest avoiding inventory that is very old as it soaks up financial capital, likely can be damaged, and subject to other shrink concerns. Many times, we think about inventory turns to help us make assessments about collective inventory care practices; my article, Calculate NetSuite Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) with Saved Search, can be adapted to produce an inventory turn report.
The general pattern to solve this kind of report forces you to think backward: Instead of rolling transactions from the past into the future to accumulate the onhand balance, you start with the balance of inventory on hand and then find all previous transactions (receipts and shipments) by date until you accumulate the balance on hand.
Get the NetSuite Inventory Aging Report
We solved this challenge back in 2018 and have continued to enhance the Suitelet-based-report-system as clients have asked for more features. Like all the work we do, it’s available to all of our clients without a license charge. We bundled it up as part of our “Business Process Automation (BPA)” accelerator bundle (ID 311735). Please see the reference article, Solving the NetSuite Aged Inventory Challenge.
If you found this article meaningful, feel free to receive notifications of new articles as I post them. If you would like to solve your inventory aging challenge, let’s have a conversation.
