Netsuite auto generated numbers | Setting Automated Numbers on NetSuite: How, Where, and Why
Have you ever thought about setting automated or auto generated numbers for your NetSuite account? If this is something you have been considering, our friendly and professional team is on hand today to give you a little more insight and guidance on how to set up automated numbers on your NetSuite account – including why you might want to do this and how you can get to the relevant pages to set this up.
Remember, setting up your NetSuite account can be a somewhat tedious process, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be difficult. So, if you have any further questions about setting up your NetSuite account in general or about today’s topic specifically, please don’t hesitate to contact our team, and we’ll do what we can to help out!
Setting Automated Numbers on Netsuite: What you Need to Know
If you’ve been looking to set automated numbers on your NetSuite account for records and transactions, the following steps should be useful. It’s worth considering how these auto generated values behave, however, and what this might mean for your business management overall.
Generally speaking, you can set a fully customized automated numbering scheme for your business records and transactions, which may also include entities, documents, schedules, and CRM actions. Automated number records can also be assigned a custom starting number, a prefix, and a suffix.
To begin with, we would recommend making a list of all business transaction types and associated prefixes. This is up to you, but you might want to choose abbreviated prefixes such as the following:
Cash Refund: CASHR
TRFR: Transfer
By setting automated numbers on your NetSuite account, you’ll be able to rapidly and easily sort through potentially long lists of transactions, making it easier to manage your business overall. It’s a little fiddly to set up, but once it’s in place, you shouldn’t need to worry about this too much as the system should handle the majority of the heavy lifting involved with automated numbers.
How to Set Up Auto Generated Numbers
Setting up auto generated numbers, once you know which numbers and prefixes you would like to assign, is a relatively simple and straightforward procedure. From your NetSuite dashboard, using the main navigation menu, head to Setup > Company > Auto Generated Numbers, as we have demonstrated below. This will bring up the auto generated numbers page, allowing you to begin customizing allocations.

Once you have loaded up this page, you will see the “Set Up Auto Generated Numbers” page as shown below. This page allows you to enable/disable entity types while also assigning prefixes, suffixes, the minimum number of digits, and the initial number; once this is completed, the current number should display as well. In addition to the entities tab, there are also Document Numbers, CRM, and Other.

While this process is a little bit of a hassle to complete, in many cases, it doesn’t have to be a major tie. Indeed, with an hour or two, you should be able to easily complete and fill out all of the auto generated numbers for your business, no matter what codes you may have chosen. However, we would highly recommend using simple and straightforward abbreviations to make the process of interpreting this data simpler overall.
We highly recommend, at this point, filling out this data carefully to ensure you don’t have to go back and complete this again at a later data. In addition, it’s often also simplest to ensure that the Minimum Digits is marked as “8.” The majority of businesses won’t actually need the minimum digits to be this high since their transactions and records likely won’t meet that scale; nevertheless, we always complete this as “8” as a baseline to keep things simple and reduce the risk of errors.
In addition, always consider carefully whether or not you want to allow your users to override the automatically generated value. Sometimes, users may want to give a number based on their own preferences – however, this could result in duplicate numbers or mistakes being made. As such, in th majority of cases, the “Allow Override” column can be maintained as false. The main and most common exception to this is when bringing in or importing old business data onto the system, to which you may want to assign a different number, such as the number that was saved on your previous system. In such a scenario, you could mark “Allow Override” as temporarily true until the import is finished.
Sorting Records
Briefly, we should warn here that sorting records will change after implementing an automatic numbering system, as this will result in records being ordered numerically rather than by letter. Furthermore, it’s also worth considering that the process of converting records to a numeric system may take a few minutes, so don’t attempt anything else while this process is completed ideally to avoid confusion.
Final Thoughts
Have you been looking to put your NetSuite account to good use? If so, then we think it’s highly worth considering the different features available for developers through the NetSuite platform, and automated or auto generated numbers are certainly a handy tool to consider! With this in mind, today, we’ve outlined some of the key things you should know about how to set and use automated numbers, and what this might mean for your business.