Create a Blank Service Invoice for Operations Effortlessly

Blank service invoice for Operations

Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to be taking a look at the accounts receivable function in NetSuite, including the aspect of generating invoices that can be then followed up for payments. So let's take a look at this. So here I am on the home dashboard and I am in the role of accounts receivable analyst. You can see this in the top right here. So the first thing I want to point out is a few tools that are immediately accessible to you. And I actually have them here on the tiles. So we've got things like the A/R register, A/R aging reports, customer aging, open invoices. So I'm actually going to show you a few of these and what they look like and some of the accessibility you have from them. So first off, we have the A/R register. So this is simply the register of all of the various things relating to accounts receivable. So that's anything from invoices that can be actual payments for these invoices. And also if I scroll down here, you're going to start seeing journal entries relating to A/R In this case, it's intercompany journal entries. So this literally has everything. It's just a register of anything relating to accounts receivable. It's got the amounts charged, the balances, it's got dates for each. It tells you whether they're paid or not. Any one of these, you can click on, which I'll show you in a second. But let's say, especially for if you're an A/R analyst, you really want to go a little bit deeper and you don't want to see everything. You just want to see what the open invoices are. Well, then you can go to this open invoices report. So this has every single invoice. What the vendor is, the date, the due date, etc.. So you've got them all available here. And again, it's dynamic. You can click on any one of these fields to pull that thing up. So it's really narrowed that down. And then one of the most common tools you have for air is the A/R aging summary. So this summary and you'll see on the A/P side of things, it's an identical sheet, but it's basically showing you on this side we have the customers and we can also see we've got some inter-company transfers occurring lower down here. It's got the balances. So these are any kind of accounts receivable that are not overdue. They haven't passed whatever that threshold is, for your accounts receivable. So those are open. And then here, this band that here we have here or you can say column is really anything and it says up here that you see that little 30 even shows the date range. Those are ones that have passed. They're overdue. They should be paid, but they have only been overdue for 30 days within that time period. Anything over that period now falls into this third column here. So you can see we don't actually have any current customers that have bills that are over 30 days. So we don't actually have any customers at the moment that are over 30 days overdue. We do have a few, however, that are within that 30 day window. So, for example, if I go to Davis supplies here, if I actually click on this amount, that $22,000, I can like I said before, you can drill into these things and it will show you in this case, we have two invoices that are making up that $22,000. And if I click on one of these and I go up here, I can actually see the invoice itself and I can see all the details related to that invoice. And if you refer back to one of these earlier tabs where we had all those open invoices, you would see those two invoices there. Just instead of having them both bunched under Davis supplies, there would be two separate ones, both being named as part of Davis supplies. So you have all these tools available to you to see what you're dealing with. What are the open invoices for your company? What are the date ranges? If we go back to this A/R aging summary, we can come down to the aging options here. And if I click on that, I have the ability to add additional columns. I can have it by 15 days and I can four columns. So 15 days, 30 days, 45, etc. I can put in irregular periods. I have a lot of different options there to make this report serve my needs for whatever my function is as an A/R analyst. So I've got a lot of different potential there. So now going back to our home dashboard here, if we're going to take a look at the aspect of generating an invoice. So there's really six different ways that you can approach this in netsuite. And the first one I consider more of, you could say an organic approach, which is that concept of, if you remember the order to cash process flow again, not for all companies, but for most companies you would have a sales order followed by especially if you're done with inventory, you'd have an item fulfillment, right? You're sending them the item. You then have an invoice generated so that they can pay it and then the payment actually occurs. So those four steps is the generic order to cash process flow. So that process flow, if you think about it, if you take a sales order record and then you take that to then item fulfillment, or if you're not dealing with item fulfillments, you can simply take that sales order and then move it onto invoicing. If you're taking those records each step along that route, that would be just following that normal order to cash process flow. The second way that you could generate an invoice would be if and you can see I actually have the option here on my reminders, the sales orders to invoice. There's actually a function where you can simply take sales orders that should be invoice and create those invoices. If you don't have that as a reminder, another way you can do that is by going to customers and we're going to go down to sales and you'll see we have here invoice sales order. So if I click on that, it brings me to this page and I've got a lot of features up here, but really what's important is down here I've got these four invoices and it shows me their dates, what the customer is, etc. And I can see these four sales orders should be or at least have the potential to be invoice, and I can simply click on them. And if I hit submit it will generate invoices for those. And then just to point out up above here, we have a few different options. What posting period do we want this to relate to? Various other date options. We also have we want this to be printed, emailed to the customer. What preference do we want with for that? Do we want with the customer usually gets or do we want to just be generated email regardless? So you do have a few options here for generating these invoices. So I've got two selected here. Let's hit submit on these and it's going to bring us to this process status page, which is basically going to be updating us on how that generation of the invoices is occurring. Now, in this case, I only selected two, so it'll happen very quickly. I'm just going to hit refresh and you can see we've got this process of generating this invoice is complete. I can actually and you can see is 100% complete. There was no errors in the process. If I actually click on this complete status and go here, it'll actually show me each sales order. What is the invoice that was generated? So let's say I come here to this invoice and click on that. I can actually take a look at the exact invoice that was generated simply by going through that process. So that whole aspect of invoicing sales orders, that's a second method for doing that. The third method is and I'm just going to turn back to my home dashboard here just as a square zero to kind of orient you. If I go up to billing and I go down to billing operation, I've got this option here schedule billing operations, so I'm going to click on that. So the way this works is you're basically setting up a schedule where it will automatically create those invoices on that schedule. And there's a lot of different parameters that you can add for that. You don't have to have one schedule that is going to do all of your invoicing. You could have several different schedules to handle various needs and requirements in each case, you would of course name what the schedule is so that it's clear, okay, this is the schedule for maybe these five clients and this one's for these types of invoices. If I scroll down here, of course it's going to ask you what is that schedule? How often does it happen, at what time, etc.. You've got options down here in terms of what is the schedule handling. So is it just creating these bills? Is it also handling credit memos if needed? Is it going to group your invoices, if that's one of your requirements? Also, do you want it to just run on all customers or do you want to run on specific customers? Maybe you have certain types of customers at certain dates, other customers happen at other dates. You can specify that. And of course, lastly, you have actually a few different options here. But really the most important thing is what are you billing are you have the ability to bill time, Is it just expenses items? Maybe you want everything, you can select all of those and and then you have that ability to create that billing schedule. So that's the third option for generating invoices, creating that schedule that will simply generate those invoices on a routine basis. But you can do it another way. The fourth option would be going to billing, billing operation and process billing operation. So if I click on that, this is really the exact same thing, except as opposed to doing it on a schedule, I'm doing it on demand. So you can see here I have all of the same features. The only difference being I can't set up the schedule right? How often is recurring? And if I put in all this information, I can hit run and it will simply run it at that moment. It will generate whatever the parameters you've set. It will generate invoices based on those parameters, and you'll be able to take a look at them right afterwards. So that, I would say, is the fourth way, the fourth process or method in which you can generate invoices. But the fifth one is using a workflow, and I'm not going to show that here, particularly because I have other videos showing you it's a whole another process in terms of how to create workflows. So you could compare that to the billing operations schedule. What's great about a workflow compared to a billing operations schedule is that workflows have just a way more parameters you can add, you can do a lot more with them. They're quite flexible. You could have certain types of customers handled one way. Other customers handle the different way within the same workflow. Maybe certain emails in one case different in another. You could add a lot of different things within one workflow, really giving you that flexibility to handle all of your different needs. And then the sixth method of generating invoices would be using suitescripts. Really, anything you can do with the workflow, you can of course also do using SuiteScripts It will of course take someone who has that programing knowledge and is able to generate the SuiteScripts but the benefit, the use case, I would say for creating a SuiteScripts would be if you have much more complex needs, a lot of different versatility you need in the generation of invoices, you might want to rely on a SuiteScript if there are limitations that a workflow can't overcome. So those are the options that you have available to you. Those six in terms of generating an invoice. And of course, once you've generated those invoices, you're then able to follow up with those customers to get an actual payment concluded. And that's it. On accounts receivable and invoicing in Net Suite, I'll see you in the next video.