This article is relevant if you are not satisfied with the way that NetSuite lays out information in its Vendor Bill Payment PDF document.
Background
NetSuite’s Advanced PDF technology has provided the framework for powerful document presentation. Most NetSuite customers will refine the provided out-of-the-box templates when they seek modifications to information and layout.
In nearly all cases, NetSuite’s document layouts meet the standards for most customers. Yet, NetSuite’s Bill Payment (vendor payment) document output will produce confusion for readers when bill credits are applied as part of the payment record. NetSuite chose a peculiar method to show how bill credits are applied. If you click the related PDF (or image), you will see how NetSuite obscures information which only creates more questions for readers. In this case, the information is created by the Accounts Payable department — which means the recipient’s Accounts Receivable department will be confused as to how the bill was applied — leading to more questions and higher administration costs.
I spoke about this in 2020 with my article, Exposing Vendor Credit information on NetSuite Check Vouchers. In this case, I am demonstrating another technique that is valuable when not using the paper check but instead uses the Bill Payment record.
Challenges Solving the NetSuite Bill Payment Advanced PDF Layout
The general approach for NetSuite Administrators to solve these problems is to modify the standard Advanced PDF template to layout the data more intuitively. Yet, as you likely have discovered because you found this article, NetSuite does not provide the detailed data to the Advanced PDF so that you can indeed solve it.
Extend NetSuite’s Advanced PDF Technologies
The challenge with NetSuite’s Advanced PDF technology is that they provide a limited scope of information to the template depending on the business record in question. If the data does not exist, the common approach is to build custom fields to carry extra information to the record so that it can be seen now by the template technology.
Oftentimes, adding an extra custom field or two does the trick. However, in the case of this Bill Payment record, major elements of the record story are missing. This reveals that a better approach is needed.
Since 2015, we have provided to our clients a license-free tool called our Content Renderer Engine. The power of the tool allows an Administrator to link together Saved Searches (and SuiteQL) to create a data universe. That data universe is then supplied to the FreeMarker templating engine which then feeds the Big Faceless Organization (BFO) Report Generator that produces the PDF output.
Not to worry. These are the exact same tools NetSuite uses to produce Advanced PDFs. With these enhanced tools, you can render HTML, PDFs (or any other string-based output).
Click here to see the resulting intuitive Bill Payment PDF.
Get More Capacity Over Your NetSuite Document Output
I would like to thank Boban D., Senior Technical Analyst, who helped solve our client challenge. The great news is that we can supply this pattern to you. Since we are a NetSuite Systems Integration Practice, our commitment is to refine our mastery over the NetSuite platform and bring our competencies to you. All of our algorithms are available to our clients without a license charge.
If you found this article relevant, feel free to sign up for notifications to new articles as I post them. If you would like to tackle your NetSuite vendor payment 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.
More Posts - Website - Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - YouTube
