What is unplanned deferred revenue in NetSuite? It represents two balances:
- Balance of revenue arrangements that are ready to process plans, but either the scheduled or manual update has not completed yet.
- Balance of revenue arrangements that are purposefully set to not process plans until fulfillment or billing (and that event has not occurred yet).
#1 is fairly straight-forward and we can assume should generally be 0.00. #2 is the primary use case that users should understand.
For #2, the revenue recognition plan may be held because the inputs are unknown until an event occurs. This may set the rev rec start date, end date or be used to facilitate a catch-up entry once planned. It is by design.
When reconciling deferred revenue, I recommend reviewing the deferred revenue waterfall report. Everyone is generally familiar with the month-by-month waterfall. The questions we often get are around the unplanned balance shown. It is important to tie out the unplanned balance when reconciling deferred revenue to ensure that no revenue arrangements are stale – either the transactional processing has been sitting in a non-fulfilled or non-billed state for a substantial amount of time, or that the native script processing is not erroring when generating the revenue plans.
