Inventory Costing

“You need to own getting this correct.  What kind of validation did you do?”

I got this message from my boss within a few months after starting in NetSuite consulting:

The crazy thing is…

• It was the second day in a row that the client failed my data import.
• I’m good with numbers and I don’t make a lot of mistakes.
• I validated my data BOTH days and they tied out to the penny.

So how did it fail?

At the time, I had no idea how inventory costing calculations ran in NetSuite.  In addition to my migration, we were also migrating other inventory-impacting transactions.  Inventory costing was set to recalculate every night at 10:00p and thus, when I woke up, the financials didn’t tie out anymore.

Lessons learned:

• How inventory costing calculations are run. See Setup >> Accounting >> Inventory Costing Preferences to see your settings.
• Don’t run “live” in Sandbox (oxymoron) for a month, then require a migration of all transactions (incl. inventory transactions) to Prod. If this happened today, I’d speak up quite loudly that this is a bad idea just asking for errors.