Handling Household Relationships in NetSuite

Owned by Trisha Companero (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Nov 07, 2014
NetSuite has very strong functionality to support house holding. Below we provide a basic house holding model. It is critical that your organization document your householding rules.
 

Contact Management Configuration

 
  • Use individual customer record and company customer records.
  • Preferences: Check the preference to display Individual customer records as contacts

 

  1. Household Model
    • Use the SubCustomers functionality
    • Use this for transactional hierarchy
    • How to create a household relationship record in NetSuite (e.g. Doe household):
      1. Parent Customer: Company Customer Type: "Smith Household"
        1. Sub-customer: Individual Customer Type: "Bill Smith"
        2. Sub-customer: Individual Customer Type: "Jane Smith"
        3. Sub-customer: Company Customer Type: "Smith Family Foundation"
        4. Sub-customer: Company Customer Type: "Smith Enterprises LLC"
          1. Often the company should not be included as a sub-customer of the household because it usually isn't exclusively associated with the household
        5. Sub-customer: Company Customer Type: "Bill Smith Donor Advised Fund"

***Transactions booked at the sub-customer level will be aggregated automatically at the parent customer level.

 

2. Sample Householding Procedures

Depending on your individual needs you may implement different procedures.

Individuals are always entered as individual customer records. Individuals are never entered as contact records.

Household containers are company customer records. They never have associated addresses, emails or contact information. Transactions are never booked to households.

Household containers are only created upon creation of the second customer record.

 

3. Householding Scenarios

 

 Managing for Duplicate Mailings

A household container is ALWAYS created for every constituent.
All contact management records are recorded at the household level, never at the constituent level.
When a constituent is merged with another into a new household:

  1. Merge constituent 1 and household 1.
  2. Merge constituent 2 and household 2.
  3. Create a new household container and add constituents 1 & 2 as sub customers.