Interesting find. We have external system that invokes a RESTlet. We follow all of NetSuite's best practice with regards to Integration Records, Access Tokens, etc. The use case is "We attempting to apply a Payment to a VendorBill" from this external system. So, we transform the Vendor into a Bill payment, loop through the available payments to apply and save. Easy right? Ok, now the NetSuite Employee, who is tied to the Access Token, customizes the Bill Payment screen to add a Date Filter to the list of Payments and applies a filter that excludes a bunch of payments. Now when the external system does the transform, that same user-based filter is applied and the integration can no longer see all the available payments.

use the bill or vendorbills default values to choose which bills appear in the apply sublist

Ya, I think you're missing the point. IF the user introduces a filter, we're screwed

the vendorbills default values bypass filters

Right, but the user-added custom filters stick

if you are trying to search for vendor bills to apply your payment to, and you cant find them because of the filters, then you want to use the vendorbills default value to choose which vendor bills show up in the apply list

Got it

it's also generally not a best practice to share a human user account with an application (unless acting as that user is a core feature of the application)?

@Shawn Talbert, so would you ask a Customer to create an integration-only Employee record? Not unreasonable I guess

it is costly

Seems like NetSuite should handle this differently then.

agreed