Discounts: Functional Details and Best Practices

Today I'm going to talk a bit about discounts – there are different ways you could go about discounting orders in NetSuite and in this blog post I’ll show you what I think is the most functional.

So, let's say I have an order as such as:
Item 1 - $100
Item 2 - $200

Let’s say you would like to offer your customer a $30 discount on this order.  One obvious simple way is to change my order to:
Item 1 - 100$
Item 2 - 170$

This will work – your customer is indeed only going to pay $270 rather than $300. But this solution is short-term and does not take into consideration the customer experience or your records keeping. For instance, using the above method you are not able to:

•    Show the customer how much money he is saving over the normal price.
•    Track your discounts, so that at the end of the year (or sooner!) you can run reports to see how much money you discounted away (and why).

A better way is using NetSuite Discount Items. These item types allow us to specifically create an item than can be added to transactions, and cause a discount. They can be configured as percentages or flat amounts.

Using Discount Items allows us to show the customer how much money they are saving, as well as being able to track exactly how much  money you discount as you do business.

To access the Discount Items, click List  ---> Accounting --> Items. Select NEW, and you will be given a list of items to choose from. Select DISCOUNT ITEMS.

When creating Discount Items, you also have the option of posting the amount discounted to a specific GL Account (very convenient because you can then view that  specific account to see all the discounts at once), or you can subtract the discount amount out of your Accounts Receivable account. Both methods are viable, it's  really just a matter of preference.

Please keep in mind that Discount Items are different than Price Levels. When you have specific pricing for specific classes of customers, that's Price Levels. Discounts should be used when you need to lower the price of an order for unplanned reasons (special agreement with a customer, when running specific marketing campaigns, etc.)

But my point is - when discounting, don't edit the price of the item. Use a Discount Item!

2010.1: Three Cool Features You May Not Know About

When it comes to the 2010.1 upgrade for NetSuite, it seems everyone knows about the well publicized features such as SuiteFlow. However, there are a lot of juicy new features that aren’t getting the attention they deserve, and unless you had the time to diligently read through all the Release Note, you may have missed them.

Not to worry, I did have the time to read all the Release Notes, and below are three of my favourite new features that seem to be flying under the radar. I’ve included the Release Notes link under each one for your information.

1- Customizing Tax Label on Printed and Emailed Transaction Forms
YAY! You can now customize how the tax label appears on your transaction PDF printouts! And I really like the way NetSuite implemented this, it's super flexible.

Basically, under Setup -->Accounting -->Set Up Taxes, you'll find a new field called "Print/Email Tax Label Format" and you can enter whatever format you want in there. You can show only the label (i.e. the word "Tax" itself), the actual tax item or even just the rate – any combination of the three is possible. You can also dictate the label of the field, so for example, you could write it as "Tax for your state: {rate}".

Pretty neat feature! This kind of flexibility has been on several of our customer's wish lists for a while.

>>Read more in the Release Notes .


2- Standard Report Alternate Ranges Now Relative to Report Date

This has the potential to be a very powerful tool, though I would say you would have to already be comfortable with Reports to use this feature to its maximum.

To summarize, say you wanted to show a report of your sales by customer category (perhaps Direct vs Reseller), and you wanted the report to show you trends for 90 days before today in 15-day increments –well, you can now do that!

>>Read more in the Release Notes


3- New Permission for Making Non-GL Changes to Transactions

A quickie but goody – you can now hand out Role Permissions to your users that will allow them to make Non-GL impacting changes on transactions in closed periods.

So for all sorts of little things like making changes to the transaction memo and item descriptions, you can give this permission to a user so they can make these changes without having to reopen the period. Incidentally, you're also guaranteed the person making the change won't accidentally make a GL Impact when editing the transaction – always a source of concern!

>>Read more in the Release Notes
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You can find the complete list of new releases (there are tons of them!) by checking out the entire Release Notes.