A purchase order is your authorization for a vendor to provide items, materials or services to your company. In NetSuite, you can create purchase orders for expenses as well as items.
To receive expenses, you must be able to add expenses to purchase orders. To enable this preference, an administrator can go to Setup > Accounting > Preferences > Accounting Preferences . Check the Allow Expenses on Purchase Orders box, and click Save.
You can now create purchase orders for expenses.
Expenses are not physical items that you receive. However, it is still important to record that the expenses have been accounted for.
For example, your Marketing Director enters a purchase order for advertising. Advertising is not an item that is delivered and received, but you want to make sure that your ad appears correctly. After the ads are verified, you can mark the advertising expense received.
To receive expenses:
Go to Transactions > Purchases > Receive Order.
In the Vendor field, select the vendor from the list, or select All to list all open purchase orders.
In the Process column, click Receive next to the purchase order you would like to receive.
Note: You cannot partially receive expenses. If you change the amount on the bill, you receive the purchase order and bill for the revised total.
Click Save.
Upon further reviewing our resources, I was able to confirm that the ability to remove the Receiving function of a Purchase Order with Expense lines only is currently a system limitation.
As explained, this is by design as supported by SuiteAnswers Article Answer Id: 11121, “A purchase order is your authorization for a vendor to provide items, materials or services to your company. In NetSuite, you can create purchase orders for expenses as well as items. Expenses are not physical items that you receive. However, it is still important to record that the expenses have been accounted for.”
Also, an Enhancement request for the functionality was logged under Enhancement 274146 Purchase orders with only Expense accounts > Option to not receive the order. You can vote for this enhancement on the SuiteIdeas page.
At this time, there is no documented workaround other than to enter the expenses in a Bill.