One of the challenges when importing the chart of accounts into NetSuite is trying to understand how a parent reference is to be configured.
Unfortunately an example template I’ve come across doesn’t differentiate what is what as per the following:
accountNumber | accountTypeRef | name | parentRef |
---|---|---|---|
6000 | Expense | Expense | |
6010 | Expense | Travel & Entertainment | 6000 Expenses |
6020 | Expense | Meals | 6010 Expense : Travel & Entertainment |
What is most confusing with this example is the final row where you don’t really know which reference Expense is referring too? Is it the accountTypeRef
? Is it the name of the uppermost parent?
What is to happen when you need to go down another sub-level in your accounting structure – what exactly is the pattern, is it:
Uppermost level's account name : next sub-level's account name : next sub-level's account name...
Unfortunately after testing a few different varieties which weren’t working for our nested account structure I eventually found the successful import, in a pattern it would look like this:
AAAA HLName : SLName : ... : LSLName
Where:
AAAA
is the nearest sub-level’s account numberHLName
is the name of the account starting at the highest levelSLName
is the name of the account at the next sub-level...
is the name of additional sub-level account namesLSLName
is the name of the account that represents the nearest sub-level’s name (if this account has a number it is that which is written in atAAAA
above).
As an example, if I have the following structure:
+ 6000 - Expenses
+ 6100 - Operational Expenses
+ 6110 - Local Expenses
+ 6111 - Printing
Where 6000
is a main header account, 6100
the next sub-level account header, 6110
an additional sub-level account header and 6111
being a posting account. Our import structure for just this data using the above table as our basic template would look as follows:
accountNumber | accountTypeRef | name | parentRef |
---|---|---|---|
6000 | Expense | Expenses | |
6100 | Expense | Operational Expenses | 6000 Expenses |
6110 | Expense | Local Expenses | 6100 Expenses : Operational Expenses |
6111 | Expense | Printing | 6110 Expenses : Operational Expenses : Local Expenses |
This portion of the import will work successfully and when done you should receive 100% success status.