What You Need for Successful Automated Reconciliation
To achieve the best and most automated reconciliation experience with Blue Onion's NetSuite Reconciliation Tool, your NetSuite implementation needs to meet specific requirements. This article outlines these requirements and identifies common issues teams encounter during onboarding.
Transaction Requirements
For Cash Sales, Customer Deposits, or Customer Payments from supported order management systems (like Shopify, Amazon):
Unique Identifiers: Each transaction must include a unique identifier (such as Order ID or Order Name) that maps back to your order management system. This identifier should be consistent across all transaction types.
Transaction Values: The full value of each transaction must be included as recorded in the source system, before any payment processor fees or related expenses are applied.
These same requirements apply to Cash Refunds or Customer Refunds from your order management systems.
Common Issues During Implementation
Missing Orders
Orders can be missing in NetSuite for several reasons:
Rate-limiting with connections between your order management system and NetSuite during high-volume periods
Missed connections for specific stores (such as certain Shopify stores)
Failures in the connector's translation logic to NetSuite
Customer Deposits Without Sales Orders
In some workflows, a customer deposit may exist in NetSuite without an associated sales order. This can happen when orders are cancelled immediately after checkout — before the order has been synced to NetSuite — but the payment has already been captured.
In these cases, Blue Onion can still reconcile the deposit as long as it includes the order reference ID (e.g., the Shopify order ID or transaction reference). The sales order itself is not required for Blue Onion's matching logic.
What Blue Onion needs to reconcile:
The customer deposit (or customer payment) must exist in NetSuite
The deposit must include the order reference ID from the source system (e.g., Shopify order ID)
What you still need on your side:
Invoices should still be created for any non-cancelled orders to properly record revenue
Item fulfillments should still be created to account for inventory
This means you can safely adjust your integration to skip syncing sales orders for immediately-cancelled orders without impacting Blue Onion's ability to reconcile the associated deposits and refunds.
Missing Refunds
Refunds might not appear in NetSuite due to:
Refund flow being omitted from the initial NetSuite implementation design
Lookup issues with current period refunds for orders placed before NetSuite implementation or connector change
Rate-limiting during high-volume periods
Missed connections for specific stores
Missing Cancellations
Some implementations ignore cancellations in their NetSuite integration:
Same-day cancellations usually don't cause issues when the original charge and refund settle in the same payout
When orders and cancellations occur at different times resulting in separate payouts, reconciliation becomes more challenging
While we have workflows to handle this, it will require some manual intervention
Tax Calculation Discrepancies
Tax issues commonly arise from:
Different tax rates between NetSuite and your order management system
Missing sales tax on shipping line items in jurisdictions that require it
Orders with Multiple Payments in Separate Settlements
Orders with multiple payment methods that settle in different payouts can complicate reconciliation:
Shop Cash rewards often settle in different payouts than direct customer payments
Facebook promotional credits may pay out in separate settlements
Cash Sales customers face greater challenges than those using Customer Deposits
Foreign Exchange Rate Discrepancies
For multi-currency transactions:
Different FX rates in NetSuite versus what's reflected by processors or banks can create reconciliation challenges
We can help quantify these differences, but some manual work will be required
Loop Returns Integration Issues
Loop Returns can complicate recording and associating refunds with original orders. We have workarounds for some NetSuite implementations and are happy to discuss specific solutions.
Additional Issues
Discounts not syncing properly on both sales and refunds
Differences between Sandbox and Production environments in NetSuite (Chart of Accounts, SKUs, Subsidiaries, etc.)
Need More Help?
If you're experiencing any of these issues or have questions about implementing the NetSuite Reconciliation Tool, please contact our support team at [email protected] or visit www.blueonionlabs.com for more information.