[dogra.diwakar]

I created a custom balance sheet in which I’ve moved some of the “BANK” account types to the “OTHER CURRENT ASSET” section. What seems to be happening is that the BANK accounts are showing up in the other current asset section as negative numbers, when they should be positive (they are debit balances). I noticed the “Reverse Sign” box in the Format section of Netsuite and noticed that in order for bank accounts to show up correctly, the “Reverse Sign” is not checked, and for Other Current Assets, the “Reverse Sign” is checked.

So in essence, I understand why the bank accounts are showing up negative, but I don’t understand why Netsuite has it setup that way (i.e. why does Netsuite need “reverse sign” to be checked for an asset balance to show up positive when it is a debit)? This basically seems to make my report impossible and makes no sense to me.

There is no option to change edit the “Bank” accounts to another account type, and I don’t really want to book reclassing entries.

Has anyone experienced this? Seems to make creating custom financial statements impossible aside from simple renaming of fields
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[mhuffman]

I believe you can work around this by creating separate financial sections for Bank and Other Current Assets, then adding Header/Summary rows around them.

I know the presentation of this in the UI is confusing and I apologize – the explanation for why the Reverse Sign option works this way is pretty arcane (related to the way we store account balances for different account types) and unfortunately it’s tough for us to address.

To add complication, depending on the country/accounting standard, the same balance may be expected to appear as positive or negative. So regardless of whether Reverse Sign is T/F for a particular account type, I’m afraid there will always be some confusion unless we can come with a way to mask it that addresses all possible use cases.

[O’Malley-Garrett]

RE: reverse signs on balance sheet

Unfortunately this is one of the many challenges that shows that NS did not consult accountants when they were actually writing the program (another one is setting up un-deposited funds as “Other asset” instead of “Bank” and not allowing you to change the account type).

I have found that it is easier to work around they system limitations if you start with a standard report and customize it rather than starting from scratch. After that, it’s a matter of playing with the signs in the formulas until the report ties out.

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