To manually close an open invoice when it is certain that the remaining amount will not be received from the customer, a Journal entry can be used. The Journal entry will involve crediting the Accounts Receivable account and debiting the Revenue account, essentially reversing the impact of the original invoice. Subsequently, the created Journals will be applied to the corresponding invoice through the “Accept payment” button.
The Journal entry’s amount will be the same as the remaining amount on the invoice. If the accounting period of the invoice is still open, the Journal entry date will align with the invoice date. However, if the accounting period is closed, the Journal entry date will be set to the current date.
To address the issue of NetSuite’s standard behaviour of automatically reversal a journal if it’s edited and saved after being applied to an invoice, we have a solution in place. This involves flagging the journals created for Invoice Closure with a checkbox labelled “Invoice Close.” If this checkbox is selected during journal creation, the workflow or script will lock the specific journal to prevent further edits.
For efficiency, it is recommended to create a single Journal entry per customer, consolidating multiple invoices into one to reduce the number of records created. The posting period for the combined Journal entry will be the current opening posting period.