Matching vendor merchandise codes to your personal stock is an annoying (however crucial) process that always comes up in NetSuite – particularly once you’re working with standardized stock that is out there with a number of suppliers, or when your buying division is sourcing from a number of areas.
When processing such vendor payments, the bill coding stage turns into very guide and time-consuming; AP groups typically find yourself having to name the seller/verify with buying, or make some assumptions that have an effect on the information in NetSuite later.
Fortunately, there may be a couple of means out.
On this information, we’ll stroll by means of other ways you may map vendor-specific merchandise codes to your NetSuite gadgets:
- Mapping A number of Distributors to One Merchandise
- Mapping One Vendor to One Merchandise
- Utilizing CSV Imports for Bulk Mapping
- Storing SKU Mappings Outdoors NetSuite (for eg. once you’re utilizing OCR)
- Utilizing Workflow Automation to mix the perfect elements of options 1 – 4
These options will differ a bit (some are extra guide whereas some options are extremely automated and good for scale) – you may decide what’s finest for what you are promoting relying in your scale of operations.
Mapping A number of Distributors to One Merchandise
Steps:
Should you solely work with one vendor per merchandise, utilizing a customized discipline or an Merchandise Alias is a less complicated methodology. This lets you retailer the seller’s SKU code straight within the merchandise report.
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That is extra helpful in eventualities when the merchandise can solely be sourced from one explicit vendor – an instance is one thing like automotive elements or digital chips that may normally be bought straight from OEMs (Unique Gear Producers) like Apple or Tesla.
Here is easy methods to implement this mapping:
Steps:
- Create a Customized Area:
- Navigate to
Customization > Lists, Information, & Fields > Merchandise Fields > New
. - Create a customized discipline referred to as Vendor SKU Code (Textual content discipline kind).
- Add this discipline to your merchandise data.
- Navigate to
- Enter Vendor SKU Code:
- Go to every merchandise report and populate the Vendor SKU Code discipline with the respective vendor’s SKU.
- Use the Vendor SKU in Transactions:
- As soon as added, this tradition discipline can be utilized in transactions like buy orders and payments to indicate the seller SKU subsequent to your inner merchandise code.
- Show the Vendor SKU on Kinds:
- In order for you the seller SKU to indicate up on printed buy orders or vendor payments, you may customise the transaction kinds to incorporate this tradition discipline.
Utilizing CSV Imports for Bulk Mapping
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That is extra of a one-time quick-fix if you do not have a really advanced stock setup on NetSuite – you could not want to do that train fairly often.
When you have a lot of gadgets and distributors, manually coming into every SKU code might be time-consuming. On this case, you need to use NetSuite’s CSV Import characteristic to bulk replace vendor SKU codes on your gadgets.
Steps:
- Put together the CSV File:
- Create a CSV file with columns for
Merchandise Title/ID
,Vendor Title
, andVendor SKU Code
.
- Create a CSV file with columns for
- Go to CSV Import Instrument:
- Navigate to
Setup > Import/Export > Import CSV Information
. - Select Merchandise because the report kind and observe the prompts to add your CSV file.
- Navigate to
- Map the Fields:
- Through the import course of, be certain that the CSV columns are appropriately mapped to the suitable fields in NetSuite (Merchandise, Vendor, and Vendor SKU Code).
- Run the Import:
- After mapping, run the import to replace all of your merchandise data with the seller SKU codes in a single go.
Storing SKU Mappings Externally
Should you’re utilizing an exterior instrument to course of invoices — resembling OCR (Optical Character Recognition) or AP Automation software program — you may want to retailer the SKU mappings in an exterior system or CSV file slightly than in NetSuite.
This methodology is helpful once you use an OCR/AP resolution and wish to map vendor codes to your inner merchandise codes on the time of coding an bill, BEFORE it’s imported into NetSuite.
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Keep in mind that many OCR/AP options will NOT deal with stock gadgets by default. You will want to retailer the mapping of vendor codes to inner merchandise codes in a separate location (like a Google Sheet or CSV) and write a customized integration to lookup from that database.
The way to Implement:
- Retailer Mappings in an Exterior CSV or Database:
- Preserve a CSV or database with the next columns:
Vendor SKU
,Inner SKU
,Vendor Title
. - This may be saved in your native system or in a cloud-based storage like Google Sheets.
- Preserve a CSV or database with the next columns:
- OCR/AP Integration:
- When an bill is available in, use your OCR instrument to extract the seller’s SKU from the bill.
- Write a script or use an integration instrument (most OCR or AP instruments enable customized integrations with Python) to search for the seller SKU in your exterior file and retrieve the corresponding inner SKU.
- When importing the information into NetSuite to create the Vendor Invoice, use the interior SKU code that you just simply fetched from the lookup in step #2.
Right here’s a easy Python script to match the seller SKU from a CSV:
import csv
def get_internal_sku(vendor_sku, csv_file):
with open(csv_file, mode="r") as file:
reader = csv.DictReader(file)
for row in reader:
if row['Vendor SKU'] == vendor_sku:
return row['Internal SKU']
return None
# Instance Utilization
vendor_sku = 'ABC123'
internal_sku = get_internal_sku(vendor_sku, 'vendor_mapping.csv')
print(f'Inner SKU: {internal_sku}')
When processing vendor payments in NetSuite, now you can use the interior SKU returned by your script or integration to make sure the right merchandise is used.
- Keep in mind that you will in all probability nonetheless need to do knowledge validation when coming into the seller payments into NetSuite (until your OCR/AP instrument already does this). Not doing this could imply damaged knowledge going into NetSuite.
Utilizing AI-Based mostly Workflow Automation
There’s one other means to do that that’s each faster + extra scaleable.
It includes utilizing an AI workflow builder like Nanonets, which lets you customise the actions you wish to do on an bill earlier than syncing it with NetSuite.
That is what a typical workflow will appear like:
- We use a Nanonets AI mannequin to extract knowledge from invoices and payments – this mannequin will extract vendor merchandise codes from every vendor invoice
- We arrange a NetSuite integration on this mannequin and create lookups to get the interior merchandise codes
- Nanonets then does the beneath for each vendor invoice that you just course of:
- Learn the seller merchandise code on the invoice
- Attempt to discover a match utilizing a mixture of SuiteQL + pure language understanding to get the precise inner merchandise code from NetSuite
- If no match is discovered, then the mannequin will check with its personal studying (i.e., it will attempt to bear in mind which inner merchandise code you picked for this vendor merchandise code for a earlier bill)
- If there’s nonetheless no match – you will want to manually choose your merchandise code
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Over time, this course of trains the AI mannequin to recollect 80-85% of all vendor merchandise codes. There’ll all the time be exceptions – nevertheless your AP crew nonetheless finally ends up saving a giant chunk of time.
Utilizing one thing like Nanonets has vital benefits:
- You will find yourself saving greater than 80% of the time it takes to search for vendor codes.
- Nanonets has in-built knowledge validation – for each bill that you just export into NetSuite, every discipline is validated and formatted to make sure consistency with NetSuite.
- You get the benefit of the NetSuite API and SuiteQL within the backend, whereas additionally getting high-accuracy OCR and AI capabilities that study out of your decisions.
A brief 15-minute name with an automation skilled is normally sufficient to get this course of began.
Conclusion
Mapping vendor SKU codes to your inner merchandise codes in NetSuite will be dealt with in a number of methods, relying on what you are promoting setup. You’ll be able to go for one thing that’s extra guide and provides you extra management, or you may totally automate it utilizing the API (with considerably greater effort and a few coding concerned).
By combining the perfect of each worlds utilizing a no-code resolution like Nanonets, you may confidently handle vendor merchandise codes, streamline knowledge entry, and cut back guide errors, saving precious time on your procurement and finance groups.
API/SuiteQL References: