Operating in multiple jurisdictions and with different accounting rules or different Industries is business as usual for many multi-national companies. The best companies drive their business using a corporate chart of accounts and headquarters accounting standards but parallel reporting is still required for international compliance and reporting.
NetSuite’s Multi-Book solution allows you to report financial results concurrently across multiple accounting standards with multiple sets of books. NetSuite’s Multi-Book solution allows accounting departments to create business transactions while automatically posting the activity to all books of accounts which they have to report in different countries efficiently regardless of currency and chart of accounts structure. Using this solution, a business can reduce the need for error-prone manual adjustments in the accounting process and improve the reporting process.
The Accounting Book record (primary), allows you to define secondary books to post to. The secondary book records allow availability to one, several or all of your subsidiaries, which gives you complete control over where your transactions are getting posted. You can also define the Base Currency for each subsidiary, which can be the same base currency as the subsidiary you normally use.
NetSuite’s Multi-Book provides powerful capabilities that help companies achieve following benefits:
- Optimize the financial close process with concurrent posting to all books as your business transaction occur, rather than waiting ‘after the fact’ until the end of the period to replicate data entry and post adjustments.
- Effective financial management across the enterprise with subsidiary-book relationship mapping capabilities to perform financial reporting and analysis accurately.
The Multi-Book Accounting features provide the ability to maintain multiple sets of accounting records based on a single set of real-time financial transactions. This enables businesses to support different managerial and regulatory compliance needs, such as:
- Generate detailed transaction-based reports for each accounting book: Transaction-level reports can be generated for individual accounting books to satisfy managerial reporting requirements and provide detailed transaction level audit trail to book specific financial statements. Saved searches and KPIs also support display by accounting book.
- Automate posting to multiple accounting books according to pre-defined accounting rules: Different revenue recognition and expense amortization rules can be created for different accounting books.
- Period Close by Accounting Book for Multi-book accounting: Accounting periods associated with any accounting book can be individually closed and reopened, without impacting your other accounting books. However, if required all books can be closed at the same time.
- Comprehensive Reporting & Analysis: With an intuitive user interface dashboard and toolset that doesn’t require developers or technical resources, end-users will have self-serve access to drill down quickly and easily into the real-time answers they need.
- Foreign Currency Management: Accounting departments can use NetSuite Multi-Book to record transactions using unique book-specific functional currencies. Based on exchange rates stored in the system, NetSuite Multi-Book can automatically calculate the general ledger impact for all books, including the realized and unrealized foreign currency gain/loss amounts per transaction, to comply with SFAS 52 and other country-specific foreign currency management regulations.
- SuiteCloud Customization: SuiteCloud customization capabilities are available for accounting departments to build custom forms, records, and workflow and map them to your business processes. Seamlessly integrated with a powerful set of scripting capabilities, the NetSuite Multi-Book accounting engine allows users to customize and automate both new and existing financial processes as accounting rules change.
While Multi-Book Accounting is a simple functionality that runs on auto-pilot once setup, it’s important to proceed carefully and get the setup sequence right. It is crucial for your accounting team to articulate clearly to the implementation team for each required mapping to ensure a smooth implementation.
Important: Multi-Book Accounting is available only in NetSuite OneWorld.
