when looking at the trial balance, the retained earnings line seem to be duplicated many times with difference balances where some of the rows on the retained earnings are the prior year P&L accounts

Did you customize the trial balance and add a field to segment the trial balance by a classification (e.g. department, location, class)? If so, this is b/c retained earning is really a calculated field, not an actual value, and so NetSuite is trying to do this calculation for retained earnings for each of your segments, which doesn't result in the correct total (it's netting some things that shouldn't be netted, I think?), and means that it's showing all lines that make up this calculation including prior year accounts (b/c they factor into retained earnings calculation ultimately, but normally just get summed together in one nice neat line). It sounds like I understand this way better than I do. The short version is we have the same problem and have to manually pull in the correct retained earnings value and populate it on some of the monthly reporting we do.

makes sense thank you