If some of the customers have subcustomers, then we should definitely consider using Consolidated Payments in NetSuite. The NetSuite Consolidated Payments feature allows to accept payments from either top level customers or from the individual subcustomers who incurred the invoice.
The Consolidated Payments feature is a way to consolidate your customers’ payments to you rather than consolidating your invoices to them.
Setting Up Consolidated Payments
Need to enable the Consolidated Payments feature, which you can do under the Advanced Features section of the Accounting tab in Enable Features.
Set Up Subcustomers in Your NetSuite Account
To create a subcustomer record in NetSuite, navigate to the list of customers (Lists > Relationships > Customers) and select View next to the customer, lead, or prospect record that will be the parent record. Then, on the parent record, choose New Subcustomer under the Create New menu.
Doing this will create an entirely new customer record that looks and acts much like a typical customer record. The main difference is that the Parent Company field will be populated with the name of the customer you created this record from.
Another way to create a subcustomer record is by opening a new customer record directly (Lists > Relationships > Customers > New) and selecting the appropriate parent customer in the Parent Company field.
Processing Consolidated Payments
process consolidated payments in the same way you process your regular payments. Navigate to Transactions > Customers > Accept Customer Payments. On the payment page, select the select a parent customer in the Customer field.
Then, under the Apply > Invoices subtab, you’ll see a list of all that customer’s open invoices, as well as the invoices for any subcustomers. If an invoice does belong to a subcustomer, the subcustomer will be listed in the Project/Sub column.
Also, the Credits and Deposits subtabs will likewise display all the credits and deposits for both the top-level customer as well as the subcustomers, and these can be applied to any of their invoices.
Tracking Balances for Consolidated Payments
After the NetSuite Consolidated Payments feature has been enabled, several consolidated balance fields are added to the Financial subtab on customer records. These fields will help to keep track of the consolidated balances for the customers in addition to the balance each customer and subcustomer has individually. The consolidated balance fields appear next to their individual balance counterparts with the name “Consolidated