The NetSuite Inbound Shipment Management feature helps you track and manage your inbound shipments. Let’s take a quick look at this feature and what it provides for your account.
Overview of NetSuite Inbound Shipment Management.
The Inbound Shipment Management feature adds the Inbound Shipment record to your account. The inbound shipment process begins when your vendor packs and ships an order to you. Recording this shipment on an Inbound Shipment record allows you to centralize shipment and receiving data for items on multiple purchase orders. It also allows you to track landed costs across an entire shipment rather than by individual items. Links to the related transactions help to keep your data centralized while streamlining the receiving process.
Setting Up NetSuite Inbound Shipment Management
In order to use the Inbound Shipment record, you’ll need to enable a few features. You can enable the Inbound Shipment Management feature on the Shipping & Receiving section of the Transactions tab in Enable Features. Other features that are required in order for Inbound Shipment to work include Purchase Orders, Advanced Receiving, Advanced Bin/Numbered Inventory Management, Advanced Inventory Management, and Landed Cost.
Any users who are responsible for receiving an inbound shipment will also need to have the Receive Orders permission enabled on their role record.
Working with NetSuite Inbound Shipment Management
Create an Inbound Shipment Record
To start the process, you’ll need to create an Inbound Shipment record. You can do that at Transactions > Purchases > Create Inbound Shipment.
On this record, enter the shipment number provided by the shipping company in the External Document Number field and fill in the Expected Shipping Date and Expected Delivery Date fields. Add any other pertinent information you have to this record, including the vessel number and bill of lading. You’ll see the status of the shipment in the Status field. After an order has been delivered, the status will update to reflect that and you can fill in the Actual Shipping Date and Actual Delivery Date fields.
Add Items to the Inbound Shipment
Under the Items subtab, record the purchase order items that are on this shipment. You can add these directly on the Inbound Shipment record, or you can use the Add PO Items button to search for and add purchase order items to the shipment.
Then, select Ok to add the items in these purchase orders to the shipment. Note that this action will add all the items on the selected purchase orders to your shipment. If for any reason the shipment contains only some of the items on a purchase order, you will need to add those items individually on the Inbound Shipment record.
Add Landed Cost to the Inbound Shipment
To add landed cost to the inbound shipment, use the Landed Cost tab on the Inbound Shipment record. Use the Cost Category column to record the type of cost, such as duty, that you are recording. The Allocation Method column allows you to define how you will allocate the cost, and the Associated Items column allows you to connect the cost to a specific item or items.
Attach Files to the Inbound Shipment
You can also attach files to the shipment record from the Communication tab. This tab allows you to keep any documentation related to the shipment connected with the Inbound Shipment record.
You will need to return to the Inbound Shipment record throughout the shipping process rather than simply creating it and leaving it alone. To view and edit any of your existing Inbound Shipment records, navigate to Transactions > Purchases > Create Inbound Shipments > List.
Conclusion
The NetSuite Inbound Shipment Management feature provides everything you need to manage and keep track of all your inbound shipments.
If this is a feature you would like to begin using in your account or if you have any other NetSuite needs, SuiteRep would love to come on board and help. Our diverse NetSuite experience enables us to provide NetSuite solutions tailored to your unique needs. Contact us to get the conversation started.
Additional Resources