Using Invoice Grouping for Consolidated Billing

There may be times when some of your larger clients will request multiple invoices out of your NetSuite system. Perhaps it is part of your order to cash process to generate multiple sales orders that may or may not relate to each other (more specific example). Another common use case we’ve leveraged Invoice Grouping for our clients is when a Customer’s centralized Accounts Payable department purchases goods and/or services on behalf  of different sites/locations (i.e. ‘franchises’).

To avoid potentially significant customizations (i.e Suitelets, scripts, etc) and any order “gymnastics” to achieve a single, consolidated invoice, you may want to consider using Invoice Groups within your NetSuite system.  This native feature allows you to consolidate multiple invoice records for a single payee into an aggregated document in your NetSuite system, thus reducing and possibly eliminating manual offline consolidating and excessive emailing.

It’s important to understand that this function just aggregates individual posting invoices into a single document, it does not have any GL impact as a result of creating a grouped invoice.  

Here’s a quick rundown of the mechanics:

• A Customer record can be identified to allow for grouping of invoices
• Invoice groups take individual invoices and relate them to a consolidated (parent) invoice. These can be grouped by PO# or manually assigned to a group
• Due dates of the individual invoices are overridden by the due date of the consolidated parent invoice. So even tho the consolidated parent is not a posting transaction it will drive the A/R aging of all grouped invoices into a single due date
• Payment(s) can be accepted at the consolidated parent level to close out the individual A/R
• The Invoice group includes a separate PDF template in a summary or detailed format

Set-up Required: 

Enable Feature:

Set-up→Enable Features→Transactions→Billing

Check “Invoice Groups” and save.

With the feature enabled a new checkbox field will appear on all customer records named “Group Invoices” (check under the financial tab first).  Check this checkbox if the invoices from this customer generally need to be consolidated.

Transactions (Sales Order):

How-To Make it Work:

Step 1: Generate Invoices

Your billing team has generated several invoices in the standard manner for the customer that you wish to group. The invoice screen will change as per the following; the status is now “Open – Ungrouped” and you’ll see additional action buttons to “Add to Group” and “Unmark for Grouping”

Step 2: Create the Consolidated Invoice

Navigate to Transactions→Sales→Group Invoices.

This functionality allows you to select ungrouped invoices for a given customer based on date and an option to group by PO# on the standard field

Also the ability to manually select which invoices would belong to the group

Completed Consolidated Invoice Group Record

A special note: Because the grouped  version of the printed PDF invoice is not exactly the same as the standard transaction PDF template, you may encounter some constraints if you are looking to display information that is not immediately available (add i.e and examples of the information).

Give it a try and if you’re stuck don’t hesitate to contact one of our highly skilled NetSuite Consultants.