What is Expense Amortization?
Expense amortization is an important element of accrual-based accounting. It allows you to allocate the cost of a prepaid expense across multiple accounting periods, ensuring expenses are recognized when they are incurred rather than when they are paid.
This is commonly needed for items like software subscriptions or services (for example, SquareWorks Premium Support) that are paid upfront, but the service is rendered for a span of multiple months.
Manually tracking prepaid expenses and posting adjustments month after month can be tedious and difficult to scale. Fortunately, NetSuite provides robust expense amortization capabilities right out of the box.
Key benefits of NetSuite’s amortization features include:
- Automating the allocation of expenses over multiple periods.
- Creating reusable templates for different types of amortization schedules that align with your accounting policies and GAAP.
- Deciding at the time of bill entry whether amortization should be applied.
- But what if there was a way to make this even easier?
Automating Amortization with SquareWorks Invoice AI
Because Invoice AI works seamlessly within NetSuite, you can combine NetSuite’s native amortization functionality with AI-powered automation to reduce manual touchpoints for your accounts payable team.
Extracting Amortization Dates with AI Directions
Using simple, natural-language AI directions, Invoice AI can extract custom data points, such as amortization start and end dates, directly from an invoice. Users with the right permissions can create these directions themselves, enabling flexible, business-specific automation without custom development.
For more information on how natural-language AI directions can transform your invoice processes, check out Beyond Templates: How AI Directions Are Revolutionizing Invoice Processing in NetSuite.
Learning Business-Specific Fields
Invoice AI can learn from your historical entries to suggest both header-level and line-level values based on how similar invoices from the same vendor and subsidiary were coded. This includes automatically selecting the correct amortization template for common expense types, ensuring consistency and compliance.
Next-Level Automation
With Invoice AI + NetSuite amortization, AP teams experience a dramatic reduction in manual work. Instead of manually reading dates off an invoice, entering them into a bill form and selecting templates each time, AP professionals can simply review pre-populated information, make any necessary adjustments, and move on to the next invoice while remaining confident that policies are being followed and data is accurate.
It’s important to remember, automation doesn’t stop with invoice capture. SquareWorks Automate offers seamless 3-Way Matching, Approvals, and Payments to provide end-to-end AP automation without leaving NetSuite. To learn more, contact us.
