Three-Way Match, Automated
How NetSuite matches purchase orders, receipts, and vendor bills automatically and routes exceptions for approval.
About this episode
One deliberately wrong vendor bill drives the whole demo: 250 units billed against a purchase order for 200, only 200 received, and the rate bumped to $10 a unit.
Ben Gibson, a solution consultant on NetSuite's wholesale distribution team, enters the bill as an accounting manager, watches NetSuite drop it into pending approval, then switches to the controller role to work the exception, checking the item's quantity and amount thresholds, confirming the variance in the three-way match view, and rejecting the bill with an email sent straight from the record. He frames it against the old routine of stapling POs, receipts, and bills together and eyeballing them for mismatches, calling NetSuite the "virtual stapler" that stops overpayments before they leak cash.
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Book a call00:05[Music] welcome to the netsuite overview on the three-way match and vendor bill approval workflow for wholesale distribution my name is ben gibson and i'm a solution consultant on the wholesale distribution team here at netsuite netsuite was designed as an integrated suite capable of running all of your business processes and from a purchasing standpoint all three transactions from purchase order item receipt and vendor bill are matched together automatically within the netsuite system and by doing so saving your business time and money by eliminating the need to manually check for vendor bill discrepancies throughout the period additionally netsuite provides the vendor bill approval workflow which flags vendor bills for discrepancies before processing payment also bills with identified discrepancies are automatically routed to the assigned supervisor for review and approval so for today's demonstration
01:04i'm going to be in roles of both the accounting manager and the controller and walk you through the power of the unified platform to illustrate how you can maintain better control over your accounts payable all while eliminating cost variances to ensure that you can avoid overpayment i'm logged in as an accounting manager so the end of the day i have a new vendor bill that was just plopped on my desk by using the global search i can quickly type for the related purchase order almost as if it's like google for my company as i'm reviewing this purchase order i see that we're getting billed for 250 units instead of the original 200 that's on the po and our warehouse recorded 200 units received also the rate was increased to 10 dollars per unit
01:54this is a little strange but it happens sometimes in our fast-paced business we have a lot of vendors and at times a few can make a mistake along the way as i enter this vendor bill information i know that this vendor bill might not necessarily be approved automatically due to the checks that we have in place with our three-way match and vendor bill approval workflow from netsuite once i save this bill i'm alerted that it is impending approval status and has been routed to our controller for a review now as a controller i'm alerted in real time of bills that need to be approved once in this bill i have a few tools to be able to investigate this further first i will check for the exceptions on this bill next i can drill into the inventory record to see what the thresholds are for quantities and amounts for this particular item and in this situation we went over those thresholds
02:53and thankfully netsuite stopped this incorrect bill in its tracks going back into the item 360 sub tab i have full visibility into the three-way match and the variances that have occurred this appears to be an error on our vendor's part so i will reject this bill and send an email directly from this bill to our vendor letting them know of the issue before netsuite my accounting team and i had to waste time stapling our purchase orders item receipts and vendor bills together then visually checking them for any discrepancies which really bogged down our resources and resulted in cash flow leakage with netsuite we essentially have a virtual stapler and an automated approval workflow to do all the heavy lifting saving us critical time and of course money