NetSuite Other Relationships
In today’s business environment, B2B relationships are becoming increasingly complicated. With more than three-quarters of companies looking to deepen relationships and collaborate with their suppliers, the lines between suppliers, customers and partners will continue to blur. For new users of NetSuite, it may not be obvious how to build these relationships because a single record cannot take on multiple roles. For example, an existing customer record cannot be used as the vendor on a purchase order. Fortunately, the Other Relationships feature lets you create linked vendor, partner, and customer records, allowing you to leverage NetSuite’s reporting and workflow customization capabilities while keeping track of your connections.
The Other Relationships feature is ideal for any businesses that leverage their vendor relationships during the sales cycle. It allows you to keep track of the items being sold, the input of the vendor’s sales team, and easily handle payment processes for both the item and sales support. Another situation where Other Relationships shine is when you sell and purchase goods and/or services from another company. Since the customer and vendor records are linked, whenever the company record is updated, it will be applied to both records. In the case where one type of transaction is more common than the other, this can proactively prevent communication errors from outdated information.
To use the Other Relationship feature you must have an existing vendor, partner, or customer record. The Other Relationship feature will not be available on a new record.
When editing the record you can navigate to the Relationships subtab, and click the + icon below Other Relationships to open the selection window.
Here you can select which additional records to create from the parent.
After saving the record, the newly created vendor, partner, or customer records can be found normally, or in the relationship subtab of any of the records.
At this point, I’m assuming you think that Other Relationships sounds like a pretty sweet feature, and you’re right. It is. But there are some important considerations when leveraging this feature. Firstly, to use Other Relationships an existing vendor, partner, or customer record is needed. You cannot use this feature when creating a new record or performing CSV imports. This could mean higher setup costs. Secondly, outstanding balance information is not shared between purchases and sales. Therefore, it is not natively possible to pay off an AP balance with an AR balance from the same business.
On last tip. If you implement a process for creating other relationships in NetSuite, it’s a good idea to always create them the same way each time. If you always create a Partner first, and then, other relationship (Customer) second, always follow that step. It’ll help you a bit with reporting as the core records will all be of the same type, and the virtual records always secondary.
Other Relationships is a useful feature with small drawbacks. Depending on what stage you’re at in your usage of NetSuite it could be a game changer. Linked relationships let you track how you interact with different businesses and simplify record upkeep. If you think this feature may help and want to learn more, reach out to our experts at Plative.
