NetSuite AP automation for manufacturing
AP automation built for the complexities of manufacturing organizations
Manufacturing and distribution companies have some of the most complex internal processes to manage of any industry, and accounts payable is no exception. High invoice volumes, supplier purchase orders, receiving workflows; multi-language, multi-currency, and multi-location operations; manual efforts cannot keep up with the AP workload in these environments. Charted AP Automation is built to live inside NetSuite, connecting your purchasing, inventory, and financial operations into one system, increasing efficiency without adding headcount. From automated invoice capture to PO matching and payment disbursement, Charted gives your team the speed, accuracy, and control they need to keep operations running.
Charted AP Automation
Manufacturing and distribution solutions for AP
Manage AP across multiple plants, warehouses, and legal entities from a single NetSuite environment. Consolidate reporting and gain full visibility into payables by location, entity, or supplier category—without manual data aggregation.
Automate onboarding new suppliers with self-service collection of W-9s, banking information, and required documentation. Keep your vendor data accurate, up-to-date, and ensure all suppliers are properly vetted before entering the payment workflow.
Automatically capture and process invoices from suppliers, raw material vendors, freight carriers, and service providers. Charted Invoice AI reads and codes invoices against your NetSuite item catalog, purchase orders, and GL structure, automatically matching POs and learning your preferred coding preferences per vendor. Manage large volumes of complex invoices without adding headcount.
Automatically match supplier invoices against open purchase orders and item receipts before any payment is released, flagging quantity, pricing, and billing variances in real-time, before transactions hit your GL or approval queue. Invoices without detected variances can be pushed through automatically and submitted for approval without requiring a manual review.
Route invoices for approval based on vendor, amount, purchase order, location, or cost center. Extend approvals to plant managers, operations leaders, and procurement teams without requiring additional NetSuite licenses for every approver. Manage approvals through email for increased efficiency, whether your approver is on the warehouse floor, traveling between locations, in the office, or at home.
Run domestic and international vendor payments originating from the US directly from NetSuite. Consolidate your payment process, reduce manual check runs, and maintain complete payment records tied to every approved invoice and PO in the system.
Transaction lifecycles are critical for manufacturing—here’s everything you need to know
Confused about what exactly is a NetSuite transaction?
In NetSuite, a transaction is any record that creates a financial or operational event: sales orders, purchase orders, work orders, item receipts, fulfillments, invoices, and assembly builds. Learn about key transaction types, manufacturing orders, assembly builds, how transaction types interconnect, and everything else you need to keep operations flowing.
Frequently asked
questions
Charted Real-Time 3-Way Match supports vendor-specific threshold overrides on top of your global 0% default. Thresholds can be configured at the subsidiary, vendor, or item level, and set based on the line quantity, line rate, line amount, or total threshold for a given subsidiary or vendor.
The Charted dashboard shows whether a purchase order is associated with any of the invoices sitting in your inbox. From there, you can see the PO’s status and leave notes on the PO or invoice for other AP users to see. Once the receipt comes in and you’re ready for bill creation, our 3-Way Match functionality automatically takes over, matching the PO, receipt, and invoice in depth based on the thresholds your team has set.
Charted Invoice AI is built to extract line-level data from non-standard or inconsistent vendor invoice formats, without requiring manual templates per vendor. For manufacturers juggling dozens of suppliers with different billing formats (raw materials, equipment, logistics), this is usually the single biggest time recovery for AP teams.
Yes, Charted Real-Time 3-Way Match ties invoices to POs and receipts directly in NetSuite, flagging discrepancies automatically rather than relying on manual cross-checking. This is especially valuable in manufacturing where blanket POs and partial shipments against a single order are common.
Charted Invoice AI has a Freight Capture setting that automatically identifies shipping charges on a scanned invoice and creates a separate line for them on the vendor bill.
You decide where that freight line goes:
- Map it to a Default Shipping Item (an inventory item like “FedEx”) to increase inventory cost via NetSuite’s Landed Cost feature.
- Map it to a Default Shipping Expense (an expense account) to treat it as a period cost.
If both are configured, the item takes priority. The key point: Charted captures and separates the freight correctly either way. The decision of whether it hits landed cost or expense is a NetSuite configuration choice, not a Charted limitation.
Charted supports a Bill Before Receipt setting. When enabled, Invoice AI can process a vendor bill against a purchase order even if no item receipt exists yet in NetSuite.
Charted 3-way Match adjusts accordingly: when this setting is on, the billed amount is compared against the PO total rather than the received total, so the match still runs cleanly without a receipt to compare against. This is the right setup for environments where vendor invoices consistently arrive ahead of the warehouse logging physical delivery.
Yes. Charted 3-way Match logic was built specifically to handle multiple receipts and multiple bills against the same PO. The ordering logic works as follows:
When checking for variances on a saved bill, receipts and bills entered after the current one are excluded from the variance check, based on the order they were created in the system. This creates a first-in, first-billed-against processing sequence. Even if three receipts are logged simultaneously due to a backlog, the variance calculation processes them in sequence rather than treating them as a single batch.
If Bill Before Receipt is off: The system compares the billed quantity against the received quantity for that line. Since nothing has been received, Charted 3-way Match will flag a variance. The bill can still be saved using “Save With Variances,” and Charted can be configured to automatically place that bill on payment hold until the variance is resolved; payment won’t be released until the receipt is logged and the match clears.
If Bill Before Receipt is on: The bill processes against the PO total without requiring a receipt, so it goes through without a receipt-based variance.