Streamlining NetSuite Billable Expenses Tracking for Income Recognition

Overview

NetSuite offers a way to pass along billable costs – things like expenses, time, and items – directly to customers. Read how to set up billing expenses to customers. But, after you’ve set up NetSuite billable expenses to be invoiced to a customer, they still don’t show up as income on the general ledger. We recently had a client who asked us to help him figure out a way to make that happen…

Track NetSuite Billable Expenses as Income

In the below example, our client was able to pass the $50.51 billable expense on to the client, but didn’t like that it wasn’t showing as income on the GL. Instead, a credit to expenses was being posted, even though theoretically it is a passthrough.

So the question is… can the line that is crediting the expense be changed to have a different effect?

After the “Bill Costs to Customers” feature is enabled, the “Track Billable Expenses In” field is also enabled on the Account record as shown below. Read more details in SuiteAnswers Article 18640.

To have billable expenses show up as income, all you need to do is update each of the Expense Accounts to track the billable expenses to the “Other Income” line.

After you have updated the Expense Accounts, when a billable expense is invoiced, the GL Impact looks like this:

The Track Billable Expense In field applies to more than just Expense Accounts. It also applies to accounts of type Cost of Goods Sold and Other Expense. If you want to ensure all billable expenses are classified as income, make sure and update each of these accounts as well.

How Tracking NetSuite Billable Expenses as Income Applies to Previously Created Invoices

Keep in mind that if you have any invoices with billable expenses before you made these changes, you will need to edit and save the invoices in order to see the changes. Also, as noted in SuiteAnswers article 36515, expense report GL Impacts will still show the account set on the Cost Category “because the account on Track Billable Expense In field gets entered only when the Expense Report gets invoiced, not when the Expense Report is created.”

The Flexibility of NetSuite

One of the reasons we love NetSuite so much is because it is built for flexibility. So solutions like this don’t require extreme customizations, just a different way of approaching the problem. In fact, if your NetSuite partner is attempting to hard code solutions and always selling you on customizations, you may want to reevaluate that relationship. Make sure you have a knowledgeable, experienced partner by your side – like Limebox – who knows how to maximize NetSuite’s capabilities without you spending more time and money than you have to.