IndustriesFurniture and fittings
A furniture business sells the same catalogue two ways. One customer walks into a showroom and takes it away; the other orders four hundred units to a specification, on a programme, installed on site. They share a factory and almost nothing else.
Last reviewed
The accounting problem
01
Catalogue items are produced to a forecast and costed at standard; bespoke items are produced to a specification, frequently once, with their own materials and setup. Costing the bespoke piece at a catalogue standard understates it by the whole of the non-recurring effort, and the pieces that lose money are the ones that felt like a prestige win.
02
Supplying a hotel or an office fit-out involves a programme, phased delivery to a site that is not ready, storage in between, and payment against milestones. Treated as a sales order with a big quantity, everything after despatch — the storage, the returns to site, the snagging — lands as unattributed cost.
03
Delivery and installation involve crews, vehicles, access constraints and return visits, and are frequently quoted as a percentage or absorbed into the price. It is a labour business attached to a manufacturing one, and unmeasured it consumes the margin the product earned.
04
Retail sales carry full margin on small volumes; contract sales carry thin margin on large ones with long payment terms and retention. Blending them produces an average that describes neither, and a business that grows its contract book can watch revenue rise while cash gets worse.
What NetSuite does about it
Catalogue items run at standard cost while bespoke items are costed against their own work order with actual materials and setup, so both are valued on a basis that fits how they were made.
A supply contract carries its programme, phased deliveries, storage and milestone billing as a project, so cost incurred after despatch reaches the contract that caused it rather than an overhead account.
Installation crews and vehicles book time against the order or contract they served, so the margin after installation is known and the next quotation is priced on what the work actually costs.
Showroom and contract sales report as separate channels with their own margin, terms and receivable profile, so growth in one is not read through the economics of the other.
Compliance · the UAE
Contract supply is B2B and falls in scope for structured electronic invoicing, including the milestone invoices a phased fit-out generates and any advance that has to be linked to the final document it is recovered against. Showroom sales are largely consumer.
UAE e-invoicing in NetSuite →A scoping call, not a sales qualifier. Bring the report you cannot produce today and we will tell you what it takes — and which of our builds is closest to it.