Using Statistical Accounts

The Statistical Accounts feature, part of the Advanced Financial module, enables your financial team to track non-monetary data and then use that information about reports and income statements. Financial users can then examine its relationship with the financial activity of your organization.

Users who would find this feature valuable include those responsible for accounting maintenance and period close activities, journal entries, cost and revenue allocation, and financial reporting using ratios such as EPS (Earnings per Share).

Users can manually make statistical journal entries or autogenerate them through a saved search run by a statistical schedule.

Users who manually make statistical journals can also record an absolute statistical balance in lieu of tracking detailed changes. This is valuable for those users who capture periodic reports on statistical non-monetary data. For example, you receive a monthly report from your Operations Department that provides the square footage of office space used by each department in your organization. Rather than track the periodic differences in used office space, you enter the absolute value that overwrites all previous values. The absolute value is then available to you through reporting.

If the Dynamic Allocation feature is enabled (Setup > Company > Enable Features > Accounting under Advanced Features), users can assign any statistical account to an allocation schedule. The weight for the allocation, based on the balance of the statistical account through statistical journals, is dynamically calculated at the time the allocation journal is generated. This is useful in advanced costing such as Activity Based Costing and Usage Based Costing, and when you are running cost centers and profit centers. Users can also use an absolute value in dynamic allocation schedules.

Note:

The Expense Allocation and Accounting Periods features (Setup > Company > Enable Features > Accounting under Advanced Features and Basic Features, respectively) are required to create allocation schedules.

To run multiple dynamic allocation schedules in a specific sequence, users can create allocation batches. Commonly referred to as the step-down allocation method in cost accounting, users define the sequence where the result of the first allocation is the source pool of the second allocation and so on. Users can include up to ten allocation schedules in a batch.

You can also enter budgets for statistical accounts. You can create budgets for departments, classes, locations, items, and customers or projects. For example, you can enter a budget for the headcount statistical account that specifies the number of new employee requisitions for the Sales Department in the upcoming financial year. You can then compare the budgeted amount against the number of new employees by customizing the Budget vs. Actual report. For more information, see Budgets in NetSuite and Budget vs. Actual Report.

There are several methods users can employ to monitor the balance of a statistical account. From the chart of accounts, users can view a specific statistical account register. From the saved search assigned to a statistical schedule, users can access the details of each statistical journal associated with that schedule. Users can search for statistical journal entries. Users can customize the Income Statement to include statistical account data, and then examine its relationship with their financial data.

Statistical Accounting Business Workflow

Enable the Statistical Accounts feature (Setup > Company > Enable Features > Accounting under Advanced Features).

Note:
The Multiple Unit of Measure feature must be enabled to use the Statistical Accounts feature.

If you intend to create dynamic allocation schedules for statistical accounts, enable the Dynamic Allocation feature (Setup > Company > Enable Features > Accounting under Advanced Features).
Define a statistical account to track non-monetary data from external sources such as office space or number of issued shares, or internal sources (NetSuite modules) such as headcount and unit of sold item. Associate a classification segment with the statistical account such as your Corporate Office location or Sales Department.
Maintain the balance of the statistical account by either:
- Manually making statistical journal entries, or
- Defining a saved search to query specific data from NetSuite modules, and then creating a statistical schedule to periodically run that saved search and autogenerate statistical journals.
  
  Note:
  Running the saved search as a query does not generate statistical journals.
- Manually updating an absolute statistical account balance through an Absolute Balance Update Offset Journal.
  
  Note:
  Absolute Balance Update Offset Journals are always created using the system date rather than the date of the manual update.
If you enabled the Dynamic Allocation feature, create any dynamic allocation schedule using the balance of a statistical account or the absolute balance as a weight of allocation. Run the allocation schedule to generate allocation journal entries.
Create an allocation batch to run dynamic and fixed allocation schedules in a sequence.
Customize the Income Statement to include statistical account data, and then examine its relationship with the financial data of your organization. For example, customize a financial statement to display statistical balances, and the financial ratios that are calculated based on those balances such as the EPS (Earnings Per Share) ratio as Net Income to Outstanding number of shares.

Statistical Accounting Business Workflow

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