Meridian Minutes: The NPI Checklist

A new item request in NetSuite involves many small but important decisions. Without a department-specific process, items can be misconfigured, leading to problems at the worst possible moment: the first sales order, purchase order, or web order.

Why structure matters: Sales, engineering, marketing, and accounting may all influence item configuration, so the process needs clear ownership and checkpoints. A simple NPI checklist, tiered departmental approvals, and structured sign-off can improve accuracy, speed, and overall effectiveness in item creation.

Here’s the core checklist we walk clients through for New Product Introduction:

1. Item Type — Inventory, Non-Inventory, Service, Kit/Package, Assembly, or Matrix. If this is wrong, in most scenarios, the type cannot be modified, and the item must be re-created.
2. Accounting Setup — Income, COGS, and Asset accounts, plus costing method. Costing method is also locked on initial item creation, and GL accounts can be problematic to update once the item is used on GL transactions.
3. Purchasing Defaults — Preferred vendor, vendor cost, reorder point/quantity for stocked items.
4. Pricing — Base price plus any price-level-specific pricing, must be set before the item hits a transaction.
5. Units of Measure — Base UOM and any purchase/sale conversions.
6. Matrix/Variant Setup — Parent and option list configured correctly before child items are generated. They are hard to fix retroactively.
7. Web Store Readiness — Display flag, category, web price, description/images. Perfect on the NetSuite side means nothing if it’s invisible online.
8. Approval/Status — Confirm the item actually cleared the approval workflow, not just saved as Active.