In NetSuite, Accounting Preferences and Accounting features enabled under Enable Features serve different purposes, though they are both related to how accounting functions are configured and utilized within the system.
1. Accounting Preferences:
- Purpose: Accounting Preferences allow you to fine-tune the behavior of various accounting-related features within your NetSuite environment.
- Location: You can find Accounting Preferences by navigating to Setup > Accounting > Accounting Preferences.
- Customization: These settings let you customize aspects such as transaction numbering, posting preferences, revenue recognition methods, tax preferences, and more. The adjustments made here affect how transactions are processed and displayed across your NetSuite account.
- Examples:
- Defining the default expense account.
- Setting up rounding rules for currency exchanges.
- Configuring the period close settings.
- Managing account numbering sequences.
2. Accounting Features Enabled under Enable Features:
- Purpose: The features enabled here determine which broader accounting functionalities are available in your NetSuite account. These are essentially high-level, structural settings that govern the availability of specific modules and tools within your NetSuite instance.
- Location: You can find these under Setup > Company > Enable Features > Accounting sub-tab.
- Functionality: When you enable a feature in this section, it activates a specific accounting module or capability within your account. For instance, enabling the Multi-Book Accounting feature allows you to maintain multiple sets of books with different accounting rules.
- Examples:
- Enabling the Multiple Currencies feature.
- Activating Revenue Recognition.
- Enabling Multi-Book Accounting.
- Enabling SuiteTax for advanced tax handling.
Key Differences:
- Scope: Accounting Preferences are more about configuring the detailed settings for how existing features behave, whereas Enable Features determines which accounting functionalities are available to be used at all.
- Impact: Changes in Accounting Preferences affect how transactions are handled and displayed, while changes in Enabled Features can introduce entirely new capabilities or modules into your NetSuite account.
These two areas work together to shape how accounting is managed within NetSuite, with Enabled Features providing the core functionality and Accounting Preferences allowing you to customize how that functionality operates.