NetSuite 2021.1 Release Notes for Life Sciences

It’s March and you know what that means. It is time to start talking about NetSuite’s Upcoming Release! Whether your account has already been upgraded or you are patiently waiting for your Release Update to show up in your Release portal, Sikich is here to walk you through your 2021.1 Release. The NetSuite 2021.1 Release is full of notable functions and enhancements that are industry specific to our Life Sciences clients and their users.

Below is a snapshot of a few of our top features picks for “The Latest & Greatest” 2021.

AP Enhancements

Advanced Printing for Vendor Bills and Vendor Credits

• Highly requested and long-awaited functionality.
• Print button will now allow to print to either standard or custom invoice template.
• If you navigate to the individual bill or bill credit record you can select the following from the Print dropdown list:
  • Print- Prints the record using the PDF/HMTL template.
  • Print GL Impact – Prints the general ledger impact of the transaction.
• If you are looking to create these custom templates, you can do so by navigating to Customizations>Forms<Advanced PDF/HTML Templates.

Default Vendor Payment Account

• In 2021.1 you can now set the default vendor payment account on three levels:
  • Company level — set company wide accounting preference
  • Subsidiary level — set preferences at subsidiary level
  • Vendor level — set preferences for individual vendors
• These will be used on the vendor prepayments, to pay a single vendor, and pay bills
• Individual preferences override preferences set on a higher level (in this order):
  • Vendor level
  • Subsidiary level
  • Company level
• This update will improve UX by automating the correct payment account, mitigates the multiple form refreshes which occur when selecting Vendor and then AP account.

Employee Management

Retract Weekly Timesheets

• Employees can now update their submitted time by retracting timesheets before they are approved by their supervisor.
• On the weekly timesheets page, in view mode, click the Retract button to retract a pending timesheet – you can use this button to retract individual time entries from the time transaction record.
• You can not retract time that is pending approval – you cannot retract time entries with any other status.
• Gives employees an efficient way to fix submitted time before approval process.
• Users have the ability to hide the “retract” button when customizing form.

Expense Report Policy Additions

• Ability to filter an expense report policy based on whether it is billable, non billable or both.
• Policies can now be applied to individual expense lines.
• Expenses can now be required to include a Memo or Receipt if expense line exceeds “Maximum Amount.” However, it’s only available if Action is “Warn but allow expenses to be submitted.”

Electronic Bank Payments

Vendor Prepayments

 Electronic Bank Payments now supports processing of vendor prepayment transactions from the Instant Bank File Page. You can also generate a Positive Pay file for vendor prepayment checks. The SuiteApp also generates bank files for vendor prepayment transactions created in NetSuite. You can process prepayments with a partial or fully paid status

Support for Multi-Subsidiary Customers

• In 2021.1 you can now assign a primary bank to each subsidiary using the new subsidiary field on Bank Details page for customers and vendors with multiple subsidiaries.
• You can also create multiple bank records per entity, based on the accounts base country of operation & process transactions for other subsidiaries if the entity bank is set to primary and bank templates match the subsidiary.

Accounting

Advanced Numbering

• Starting with the 2020.2 Release users were introduced to Flexible setup for document and transaction numbering that reflected various requirements of local countries along with automated numbering on transaction type per calendar/fiscal year.
• With the 2021.1 Release users will get:
  • Support for additional transaction types
  • Separated permissions
  • Support for importing document numbers from external systems

If you have any questions regarding the NetSuite 2021.1 release features for life sciences, or the NetSuite Release/Upgrade process in general, please do not hesitate to contact us at any time. We have resources at Sikich who can help you prepare and get the most out of each release.