Congratulations! You are a few short steps away from integrating NetSuite with your Emburse Professional account, saving your organization countless hours of manual effort and administration.
To ensure a seamless implementation, please complete the following steps before attempting to connect both systems. Completing these steps ahead of time will simplify the onboarding process.
Get Started in NetSuite Before Connecting
The following actions will need to be completed prior to connecting your NetSuite instance to your organization’s Emburse Professional account. Log in to NetSuite as an Administrator and complete the following tasks.
1. Generate Authentication Tokens and Download the Emburse Integration Bundle
Estimated Effort: 5 minutes
Authentication tokens will connect Emburse Professional with your organization’s NetSuite environment and allow us to move data between both systems.
Follow this step-by-step guide to generate the necessary tokens: Generate NetSuite Authentication Tokens for the Emburse NetSuite Integration.
2. Create Emburse Roles for NetSuite Employee/Vendor Records
Estimated Effort: 15 minutes
In order for an employee or vendor record to synchronize to Emburse Professional as a user record, a role must be assigned to each record. Emburse Professional offers four different user role types, each with its own set of permissions and access.
Use this guide to create the necessary roles in NetSuite and assign them to your employee or vendor records prior to synchronization: Create Emburse Professional User Roles in NetSuite for the Emburse NetSuite Integration
3. Apply Supervisor and Department Fields to Vendor Records
Estimated Effort: 10 minutes
Organizations that have their employees configured as vendors within NetSuite will need to add two custom fields to their vendor records:
- A Supervisor field, which will map to the First Approver field in Emburse Professional
- A Department field, which will map to the Department field in Emburse Professional.
Both fields are required in order to synchronize a Vendor to Emburse as a user.
Create the Supervisor Field
1. Select Customization, then select Lists, Records, & Fields > Entity Fields > New.
2. Enter the following information on the new entity record:
- Label: Enter a field name, e.g., Vendor’s Supervisor. This will be the label for the field on the vendor records in NetSuite.
- ID: Enter a unique ID. This ID will be needed when configuring your integration with Emburse.
- Description: Enter a brief description.
- Type: Select List/Record.
- List/Record: Select Vendor.
- Under Applies To, select Vendor.
3. Optional: On the Display tab, select the subtab where the new field should appear on the vendor record in NetSuite.
4. Click Save. The new field will now be available on the vendor records, and a supervisor can be assigned to each user.
Create the Department Field
Similar to the Supervisor field, the Department field in NetSuite is not native to the vendor record. For this reason, we will create another custom field and apply it to the vendor record in order to store each user’s default Department value.
1. Select Customization, then select Lists, Records, & Fields > Entity Fields > New.
2. Enter the following information on the new entity record:
- Label: Enter a field name, e.g., Vendor’s Department. This will be the label of the field on the vendor records in NetSuite.
- ID: Enter a unique ID. This ID will be needed later when configuring your Integration with Emburse.
- Description: Enter a brief description.
- Type: Select List/Record.
- List/Record: Select Department. Selecting Department will allow you to assign a value from your default Department list to each vendor.
- Under Applies To, select Vendor.
3. Optional: On the Display tab, select the subtab where the new field should appear on the vendor record in NetSuite.
4. Click Save. The new field will now be available on the vendor records, and a department can be assigned to each user.
4. Assign Values to Each Employee/Vendor Record
Estimated Effort: 10 minutes
With all of the necessary fields created in NetSuite, it is time to assign values to your employee or vendor records to ensure the records synchronize to Emburse without issue.
For organizations whose users are created as employees in NetSuite, open the employee record of each user who will need access to Emburse and ensure the following fields are populated with applicable values:
- Emburse User box is checked (if your organization plans to send a subset of users to Emburse).
- User Role
- Department (Native NetSuite Department field)
- A Supervisor or Expense Approver is selected (you will choose which field to synchronize in a future step)
- The Employee record is active and has an Email Address, First Name, and Last Name
For organizations whose users are created as vendors in NetSuite, open the vendor record of each user who will need access to Emburse Professional and ensure the following fields are populated with applicable values:
- Emburse User box is checked
- User Role
- Department (Custom Field using the Department list created in a previous step)
- Supervisor (Custom Field using the Vendor list created in a previous step)
- The Vendor record is active, set as an Individual-type Vendor, and has an Email Address, First Name, and Last Name
5. Create Expense Categories in NetSuite
Estimated Effort: 10 minutes
The Emburse NetSuite connector will import your existing expense categories from NetSuite into Emburse Professional for use on expense reports. Additionally, the expense categories selected on Emburse Professional expense reports will export back to NetSuite and map expenses to the appropriate expense account, to ensure accurate reconciliation.
Whether you are exporting to the Expense Report module in NetSuite, or exporting reports as a Vendor Bill, you must maintain an expense category list within NetSuite.
1. To review your expense category list in NetSuite, select Setup, then Accounting, then Expense Categories.
Any categories listed here will import to Emburse Professional and could be selected by end users when creating an expense report.
2. If no categories exist, select New to create new categories.
3. Enter the Name, select an Expense Account to which the expense category will be linked, and select the Subsidiaries to which the category applies.
- Name: This will be the name the end user sees when selecting an expense category in Emburse Professional. Typical expense category names include Airfare, Hotels/Lodging, Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and Office Supplies.
- Expense Account: Select the Expense Account that should map to the expense category. Mapping to an Expense Account ensures the transactions submitted in Emburse Professional reconcile to the appropriate Account in NetSuite
- Subsidiary: Select the Subsidiaries that should have access to the expense category.
Active expense categories will import to Emburse Professional during your first scheduled synchronization, which will be completed in a later step.
Steps to Take in Emburse Professional
There are a few settings in Emburse Professional that, if enabled, will greatly improve your experience with NetSuite and limit any potential expense report export errors. Follow the steps below to configure your Emburse Professional account for maximum integration efficiency.
6. Enable Expense Equality Check
NetSuite allows only one credit card account to be linked to an expense report. If your organization only has one credit card program connected to Emburse Professional, this will not be an issue.
However, if your organization integrates multiple credit card programs with Emburse Professional, reconciliation in NetSuite may become an issue if credit card expenses from multiple card programs are included on the same expense report.
To prevent this, we recommend enabling an Expense Equality Check, which will prevent the submission of expense reports containing expenses from multiple card programs.
1. To enable an Expense Equality Check, log in to Emburse Professional as an Administrator and click System Configuration. Under Company Policy > Travel and Expense Policy, click on View and Edit Policy.
System Configuration. Under Company Policy > Travel and Expense Policy, click on View and Edit Policy.2. Scroll down to Expense Equality Checks and select Credit Card Program in the drop-down.
3. The new equality check will be added. Check "Ignore expense lines with empty Credit Card Program values." This will allow a user to submit reimbursable expenses on the same report as credit card expenses.
4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save.
Now, when users attempt to submit an expense report containing transactions from multiple card programs, they will receive an error and will not be able to submit the report until this is corrected.
This ensures that all expense reports exported to NetSuite will reconcile to the correct Credit Card Account.
7. Prevent Negative Expense Report Totals
NetSuite does not allow expense reports with a negative expense report total. While it is unlikely for an employee to submit a negative report through Emburse Professional, it remains possible. To account for this, validation can be added to your organization’s Emburse Professional account to prevent the submission of negative expense reports.
Reach out to our Support team and request that validation be added to your account to prevent negative expense reports from being submitted.