NetSuite Connector

There are three concepts Productiv has extended our product to support:

• Amortization
• Accruals
• Fiscal-year.

 All are necessary for facilitating better IT-Finance collaboration while also minimizing confusion for non-finance users. 

Let’s examine what this looks like.

Imagine it’s January 1, 2022 and you sign a one year contract to use an app called Sienna. On January 15 Sienna sends us a bill for 120K. At that time, they would have been using the old NetSuite connector and our system shows a spend of 120K for Sienna in January 22.

The issue would have been on January 16, 2023 we’d start showing zero spend for Sienna for the last 12 months which isn’t exactly accurate since you’ve been effectively been paying 10K per month. Not zero. For an accurate reading your finance team would have to make 12 journal-entries of 10K per month from January 22 to December 22.

That was how NetSuite behaved in 2022.

Today – 2023 and beyond – NetSuite amortizes the bill automatically. Therefore, the Sienna spend for fiscal year 22 and fiscal year 23 are accurately shown as $10K and $110K.

Why do I see only part of the spend I was billed for?

It’s because you’re using the old NetSuite connector.

Say it is Mar 27th 2022, and there is someone looking into spend on Sienna... they will see $20K spend FY23-to-date (for Feb and Mar). Even if they switch to FY22, they see $10K spend (for Jan). It gives the appearance of a data trust issue as the contract says $120K, they approved that bill of $120K a couple of months ago, and yet the number in Productiv only add up to $30K.

And, to make matters worse, the old way of just pulling the bill instead of detailed monthly-entries seems to work better — it would've shown the whole $120K spend for Sienna in past-12-months.

You might be forgiven for saying — wait a second, this is correct data — you really only spent $10K in FY22 and have only spent $20K in FY23 so far. The rest of the $90K automatically shows up in $10K/mo chunks for future months as time passes.

Why are there negative-dollar entries in our spend data (pulled from NetSuite)?

Say things happened slightly differently than above. You bought Sienna for 2022, and started using Sienna in Jan'22. BUT, they had some delays and sent you the $120K bill in Mar'22 instead of Jan'22.

Old NS connector would've seen $0 spend for Jan & Feb and $120K for Mar. The new connector will read $10K/mo per month journal-entry, starting Jan, as usual. Someone might say — wait a second, we might not have received the bill in Jan, but we know we are using Sienna and are spending $10K in Jan. So, we'll accrue this forward. They'll create NetSuite journal-entries like this:

• Jan 31: spent $10K on Sienna // (create a "fake" entry for +10K in Jan)
• Feb 1: spent -$10K on Sienna // (cancel that previous "fake" entry)
• ... bill still didn't arrive in Feb
• Feb 28: spent $20K on Sienna // (create a "fake" entry, Feb still needs to add up to +$10K)
• Mar 1: spent -$20K on Sienna // (cancel that previous "fake" entry)
• ... March 16, bill arrived for $120K
• Mar 16: create $30K for Mar (thus, +$10K for Mar), and $10K/mo for Apr→Dec