What is a Summary Account
Summary accounts are useful when you want to create a non-posting, inactive parent account that has active child accounts. It allows you to see a summary balance of all the child accounts which is useful while reading the financial statements.
Challenge
To load the initial COA in the system the common method used is the CSV import, but as useful as the importing tool of NetSuite is, it has its own limitations. NetSuite CSV import tool does not allow to tag the accounts as summary in bulk. Therefore the user or consultant has to go into each account once they are imported and tag them as a summary manually. If the list is huge it takes a considerable amount of time to do this activity. Thus comes this solution, which will allow you to tag accounts as Summary with 4 steps.
Solution
Step 1:
Create a custom field on the “Account” record. Go to Customization > Lists, Records, & Fields > Other Record Fields > Select the “Record Type” as “Account” and create a checkbox type custom field called “Is Summary”
Step 2:
Import the COA as you usually do, but this time also map the Summary checkbox to the “Is Summary” custom checkbox field.
Step 3:
Create an Account Search by going List > Accounting > Accounts > Search. Select the criteria as “Is Summary = True” and “Summary = False”.
Step 4:
- Create a workflow on record type “Account” with release status as “Testing” and set initiation to scheduled, select the saved search you just created.
- Create a new action of “Set Field Value”, select the field as “Summary” and Value to be from “Is Summary” field.
- Go to the workflow setup and click on “Execute Now”. it will run on the accounts that are on the saved search.
If you would to learn more about how you can optimize NetSuite tools to optimize your speed of work in NetSuite, you can contact us and we will be happy to help you out.