If I am using parent departments as well as sub-departments but I only want to be able to book on the sub-departments. The parent departments are only for consolidation/roll-up. How can I best view such consolidation reports in Netsuite and at the same time lock the parent departments from being booked on?

AI generated answer (using internal Slack threads):

****** Disclaimer: This response was generated by an artificial intelligence assistant based on previous conversations from multiple Slack channels, and may contain inaccuracies or mistakes. ****** To prevent transactions from being posted to parent departments in NetSuite, you can inactivate the parent departments. However, if you are using the parent departments on the Employee record, you can create a workflow to set the department to NULL if a user selects a parent, and display a message asking the user to select a sub-department. This will ensure that only sub-departments are available for transactions. For viewing consolidation reports, you can create a new "Ghost Parent" that is the top-level subsidiary in the organization. This "Ghost Parent" will have two child subsidiaries - the currently existing Parent and the new Subsidiary you have created. You'll never need to report at the Consolidated "Parent" level, but it will exist nonetheless. You'll just have the two separate child entities operating side by side, rolling up to the Ghost parent. To do this, you will need to set the "Allow Subsidiary Hierarchy To Be Modified" value in your General Preferences. This will allow you to assign the current parent as a child of the new parent. It is recommended to do this in Sandbox first, and if your subsidiaries operate in multiple base currencies, there may be consolidated exchange rate implications as well. For locking the parent departments during the accounting period close, you can build a custom solution. A simple suitelet can be created where they check a box for whatever periods they want to lock for that sub. Records are created for each period when setting up new accounting periods for the year. The suitelet is just used to check/uncheck boxes on those records. Then a workflow can be deployed to all posting transactions that checks against the status of the record the suitelet modified, and moves them to the locked workflow state if the checkbox is on the record that period/sub combo.