NetSuite development accounts are isolated from your production account, in which you can develop and test new applications and customization without worrying about affecting your production account.
The best time to begin using development accounts is at the start of a new project. It can be difficult to migrate to a development account if you are already in the middle of a development project in your sandbox. You should finish existing projects in your sandbox, and start new projects in a development account.
Note
You need multiple sandbox accounts if you have multiple large projects which need
distinct accounts for User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
Development accounts have the same features and NetSuite-provisioned SuiteApps as your company's production account, but do not contain any production data. You can populate the account with only the data you need for development and testing purposes.
Because development accounts do not contain any production data, you can let outside partners develop something for you. For this reason, you should enter only non-sensitive test data in development accounts.
Warning
Do not enter sensitive information or any real customer data, such as contact
information or credit card numbers, in development accounts. Transactions will
be processed and invoices will be generated.
Benefits of Development Accounts
Customers who purchase sandbox accounts also receive three development accounts. As of 2018.1, one development account per customer is upgraded to 2018.1 in phase 0. The other two development accounts are not upgraded until the last phase. This timing ensures that each customer with development accounts can work with both the lagging and leading versions of NetSuite until the release upgrade cycle is complete.
Development accounts are never refreshed, unlike sandbox accounts, so you never have to worry about your work in progress being accidentally overwritten by a refresh.
Development accounts provide ideal places for:
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Creating new applications and customization.
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Testing customization elements before deployment.
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Fixing issues with existing customization.
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Trying out third-party integration features.
Actions you take in development accounts, such as transaction entries, record deletions, and form customization, have no effect on your NetSuite production account. However, development accounts are not guarded from external touch points in the same way as sandbox and Release Preview accounts can be. For example, in sandbox and Release Preview, you can specify how you want email to be handled in these accounts. You cannot configure email delivery from a development account in a similar manner. Email messages sent from development accounts are delivered to the logged-in user.
Administrators can change the name of each development account at Setup > Company Information to make it easier to distinguish among these accounts. Development accounts are not refreshed, unlike sandbox accounts, so these changes will not be overwritten.