Managing Variances, Payment Holds, and Overrides

Effectively managing variances during the vendor billing process is critical for maintaining financial accuracy and enforcing internal controls. NetSuite’s Three-Way Match (3WM) feature allows organizations to define how bills with discrepancies are handled — whether they can be saved, placed on payment hold, or overridden by authorized personnel. These settings provide a balance between automated enforcement and operational flexibility.

This article explains how to configure variance handling settings on the 3WM Settings page in NetSuite. It covers how to allow or block saving bills with variances, enable automatic payment holds, and assign roles that are permitted to override those holds.

Manage Variances, Payment Holds, and Overrides

The 3WM Settings page includes options for defining how variances are handled, whether payment holds should be enforced automatically, and which roles are authorized to bypass holds when necessary.

Follow these steps to configure how variances and payment holds are handled on the 3WM Settings page:

1. On the 3WM Settings page, one of the key options to review is whether users are allowed to save vendor bills when variances exist. This can be controlled by checking or unchecking the ALLOW SAVE WITH VARIANCES box located under the Settings section. By default, this setting is enabled (checked):

   

2. If this box is unchecked, users will be prevented from saving the bill if any variance is detected:

   

3. Another control available to organizations is the option to automatically place a bill on payment hold when a variance occurs. To enable this, check the HOLD PAYMENT OF BILLS WITH VARIANCES box under the Advanced Settings section:

   

   When selected, this setting automatically checks the standard payment hold box in NetSuite if a variance is detected.

4. If your organization uses this setting, it’s also important to define which roles are authorized to override the payment hold. To configure this, use the ROLES ALLOWED TO OVERRIDE PAYMENT HOLD dropdown to select the appropriate roles (e.g., CEO):

   

   Although the setting refers to roles rather than individual employees, any employee assigned to the specified role can override the hold. This can be especially useful when the automatic logic applies a hold, but the payment still needs to be released, for example, by the CEO or NetSuite Administrator.

This concludes the overview of managing variances, payment holds, and overrides in NetSuite.