Bank Register and AP/AR Aging
In this video we cover the Bank Register and the Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable Aging reports. These three reports give you a better view into how much cash you have, and when bills and invoices are due. You can use these reports to help run your business, and we cover how in this lesson. We also cover searching through reports using a browser search and the problems you might encounter
Transcript
The bank register allows you to see detailed information about transactions NetSuite thinks have affected your bank accounts. The AP and AR Aging reports allow you to make sure you pay your bills on time, and receive customer payments on time. We’ll take a look at both of those in this video.
Let’s start with the bank register. We get there by going to Reports, Banking and Budgeting, and clicking on Bank Register. Just like many of the other reports, this one has a flyout menu that allows you to customize it, if you want. You can also get to this after having opened the report and by selecting customize at the bottom. Those two options, the customize flyout menu, and the button at the bottom will take you to the same place, for most reports that have both.
This bank register is going to show us everything, that NetSuite is aware of, that has hit our bank account for the selected time period. Because I am looking at a test account there is not much data; you’ll probably have more. I’ll go ahead and adjust our dates to see more. This is likely closer to what you have. We can see this is basically just a simple bank register. Most of what applies to other reports applies here too. We can drill down to transactions we want to take a closer look at, and of course we can print or email this as needed.
This report is often used during financial audits, and to help with bank reconciliation. NetSuite however does have a full reconciliation process. That is found under Transactions, Bank, and Reconcile Bank Statement. There is also a report for bank reconciliation found under Reports, Banking and Budgeting, and Reconciliation.
Back here at the bank register, I want to caution you about using a browser search when looking through reports. If we scroll down, we see that I have a payee, named Cray. I’ll go ahead and perform a browser search. This can be done by either holding down the Ctrl key, and pressing the F key, or by selecting find, from your web browsers menu. If I type in Cray, we see that we do, in fact, find and highlight all the instances of Cray, as a payee. Now, I’ll close my find menu and scroll back to the top. I’ll search for Cray again. Well this is strange, we aren’t finding them, but we saw just a moment ago that they are listed here. So, what’s going on? Well basically, when you are viewing a report, not all of it will be loaded into the browser, if it spans more than a few pages. NetSuite uses JavaScript to only load pieces of the report that are actually needed. It’s using a technology called AJAX. Basically, it means that everything that you have in the report is not necessarily present in the browser. So, if you do need to find something in the report, it is best to use the find box, down here. If we type in Cray, down here, we do find it. This applies to all reports, but the reason I brought it up now, is that I see searches used here quite often, in order to find a specific transaction, or dollar amount, or something else of that nature. This however does not apply to most other places in NetSuite, aside from reports.
Let’s take a look at the accounts payable and accounts receivable aging reports. The accounts payable can be found under Reports, then Vendors and Payables, and AP Aging. The accounts receivable can be found under Customer & Receivables, and AR Aging. I’ve opened both of these in new tabs, so we can compare them. They look pretty similar, and they should, since they basically track very similar things. This AP Aging Summary will show you what accounts owe you money, and how long they have owed that money, as of the date you select down here. If we go over to the AR Aging Summary, this will show us what accounts, which are usually vendors, we owe money to, and how long we have owed them money. So, you can probably see how each of these are just different sides of the same coin. In fact, in a perfect world, every balance you see in your AR aging, would also be reflected in one of your customers AP aging reports. This would mean that you know, that they owe you money, and they know that they owe you money, and hopefully, they pay you. The converse of that is also true for your AR aging.
We have a few options for these that we don’t for most others, and they are specific to aging reports. AP and AR aging summaries are both point in time, and you can view how your finances looked, at any specific point in time, by changing this date. You could also change it down here. We can also change the interval, I often see this changed to 15 days, and the number of columns here at the top. Once we make these changes, we still have to click refresh, and you can see the changes that were made. This is pretty much it for these two reports.
The bank register and the aging reports we looked at allow you to keep a hold of your finances, and now you have a good idea how to use them.