Pharmaceutical Chargebacks in Acumatica: Product and Customer Setup
Processing pharmaceutical chargebacks in Acumatica requires integration between Acumatica and chargeback processing software. This integration needs to link pharmaceutical chargeback submitters with Acumatica wholesaler customer accounts, and products from EDI 844 submissions with Acumatica items.
Chargeback submitters identify themselves in EDI 844 by their unique industry ids, and products by National Drug Code in 11-digit format (NDC-11).
For a good review of chargeback mapping, visit https://relasoft.net/quickbooks-integrator/.
Acumatica offers several options to store these key data elements. This post reviews available options and outlines practical steps for their implementation.
Wholesale Customer Setup
Largest pharmaceutical wholesalers have tens of distribution centers (DC), each of which has its own ship-to address.
DCs use their DEA numbers in their pharmaceutical chargeback requests to manufacturers in all accepted formats: EDI 844, MS Excel or CSV files. Some wholesalers, not registered with DEA, use their HIN numbers instead.
A separate customer record for each DC allows monitoring sales performance, inventory level and other revenue management metrics on the DC level. A field to track DC unique industry ID helps to automate mapping between submitters and Acumatica customers.
Users also need a way to differentiate wholesalers from others. This identification can be done by either creating and using customer class “Wholesalers”, or adding a flag “Wholesaler” as an attribute, or as a custom field.
Chargeback Products Setup
Pharmaceutical products are identified in chargeback submissions by their NDC-11 codes. The code consists of 11 digits, where the first five digits identify the product labeler code, and the other six digits identify the product chemical component and a package size.
A manufacturer can have one or more registered labeler codes.
Acumatica may have different Stock and Non-Stock items set to track sales and chargeback deductions for the products. It is helpful to store NDC code for all of those chargeback payment items if chargeback payments are analyzed on an item level. If chargeback payments relate to multiple products, storing NDC is not necessary.
Users may identify Acumatica items for chargeback deductions by using Inventory ID field, or in separately created additional fields.
Creating New Fields in Acumatica
Acumatica offers two ways to create new fields: Attributes and Custom Fields.
Using Attributes has the following advantages:
- Creating new Attributes does not require software development
- Acumatica database structure does not change
- Attribute management is easy, including fields removal
- Attributes are created for specific groups of customers or products to which they apply
New Custom Fields change the database structure for all tenants on the Acumatica instance, and not just for the company (tenant) the change was made for. In the event that Custom Fields are later deleted, Acumatica does not remove their respective fields from the tables.
Custom fields have at least one advantage: software developers have more control over their behavior than over attributes. However, simple fields like NDC, DEA or HIN won’t benefit from this advantage.
We recommend using Attributes for all fields required to process pharmaceutical chargebacks in Acumatica.
Creating attributes is described in details at creating-attributes-in-acumatica.
Entry Mask is best to use for NDC for processing pharmaceutical chargebacks in Acumatica for one labeler code, while Reg. Exp. is the proper solution for NDC with multiple labeler codes.
Assigning Attributes to Customers and Items
Users link DEA and NDC attributes to customer and item classes under menu option Receivables, in the section Preference. If section Preference is not readily visible, click Show All at the bottom of the screen to display all menu options.
While on the Customer Class or Item Class maintenance screen, choose the desired customer class or item class, go to its Attributes tab and add the appropriate attribute.
Once user assigns this customer class to a customer, the attribute shows up under the Attribute tab on the customer record.
Summary
In this study, as Part 1 of the series on pharmaceutical chargebacks in Acumatica, we reviewed the process of adding fields to customers and items and came up with the following recommendations:
- Create new fields as Attributes, rather than Custom Fields;
- Use Customer Class to mark wholesaler accounts
- Provided Entry Masks enforce input validation for NDC with one labeler code, DEA and HIN
- Recommended Regular Expressions validate NDC by the labeler code and general formatting for manufacturers with several labeler codes