The Vendor Prepayments feature records and tracks deposit amounts paid to vendors before they accept a purchase order for a good or service. You can apply these prepayment amounts against open bills for the vendor. Vendor Prepayments enables you to record and track multiple prepayments and prepayment applications for your vendors.
After you make a prepayment to a vendor, you must apply the prepayment against the vendor bills. You can apply the prepayment manually, or configure NetSuite to apply the prepayment automatically. You can either apply the full prepayment amount to one bill or split the prepayment amount across several bills from the same vendor.
In NetSuite, you can work with vendor prepayments in two different ways:
- The vendor prepayment is associated with a purchase order.
- You can associate one or more vendor prepayments with a purchase order for the same vendor. When the vendor prepayment and the purchase are associated, you can configure NetSuite to automatically apply the vendor prepayment to the vendor bills.
- The vendor prepayment is not associated with a purchase order (stand-alone vendor prepayment).
- When the vendor prepayment is not associated with the purchase order, NetSuite cannot apply the prepayment to the vendor bills automatically. In this scenario, you must apply the vendor prepayment to the bills manually.