How NetSuite Reporting Technology Drives Sales

There are two primary kinds of NetSuite reporting technology:

1. Reports
2. Saved Search

Both are valuable and offer ways to get at different kinds of information.  Let’s first discuss Reports.

NetSuite Reports for Presentation

NetSuite reports are generally classified into two types: banded reports and financial reports. Banded reports are formatted similar to the way data is presented in tools such as MS Access and Crystalreports, where there is a header, footer, sub-groups, and data columns. The way NetSuite gives you access to information in banded reports is via a predefined view for popular data constructs such as sales orders, invoices, customer information, agings, etc.

Financial reports work differently.  You can define row and column layouts that allow you to include or exclude specific general ledger accounts.  These layouts can then be assembled to give you the output you seek.  The classic example is the calculation of gross profit.  Start with a row layout of all your sales-related accounts.  Then create another row layout for all your costs related to those sales.  Finally, create a third row layout that is the difference between the sales layout and the cost of sales layout.  When working with these reports, first select a canned (NetSuite provided) report. From there, you can customize by adding or removing columns. You can also create computed columns, which essentially take one data column along with another to create a third column.  The third column may simply be the difference or the sum of the two original data columns. You can also define hierarchical grouping levels that can be as deep as you want – for example, you may want a sales order report to subtotal on the sales rep, the sales territory, and then the division of the company.  NetSuite allows you to collapse or expand these levels on demand or as part of the definition.

NetSuite is intelligent about report security.  If your role does not have permission to a particular view of the data, the report will honor this and not display data.  For example, you may want to give salespeople access to their sales orders but they should not see other people’s sales orders.  Permissions are always a part of the consideration when working with reports.

NetSuite does a good job on report distribution.  You can easily email a report in HTML, Excel or PDF formats.  You can also schedule a report to run at a regular frequency and that report can be distributed to any number of email addresses.  Believe it or not, this scheduling and distribution capacity is a challenge for many general purpose reporting tools.

To setup your own reports, the learning curve is not steep.  You won’t need to learn how to connect the report tools to the database.  You won’t need to prep the data to get it to report right.  The primary challenge that most users face is the number of possible data elements that can be included.  Let’s remember that NetSuite is a robust ERP and CRM platform.  As such, it is tracking a large range of related data elements.  The data elements are named in business terms.  Instead of a column being named “dts-sales-order-date-time-modified” which may be what it is called in the underlying database, it will be named “Last Modified.”  In our experience, users that invest in learning to customize reports become better overall actors with the NetSuite tools as they learn how the system is logically connected.

NetSuite Saved Searches for Analysis

Now let’s discuss NetSuite’s Saved Search technology.  Saved Search is designed to allow you to get data out effectively into a grid which is good for analysis.  Like Reports, you can start with an existing search or from scratch.  The way NetSuite works is to give you a primary data entity, such as a Sales Order, and then it allows you to get access to related tables one hop away. For example, the Sales Order will have reference to the Product table, called Items.  It will also have reference to the Salesperson stored in the employee table.  Your saved search can reference all the Sales Orders and include the Salesperson’s phone number and the item’s list and discounted prices, even though these related data elements are not captured at the Sales Order level.

For those more technically oriented, this reference feature is like performing an SQL join.  The good news is that this is all setup for you which significantly reduces the cost to get at data by all business users. Here is yet another example of how NetSuite really can deliver on the promise to get rid of the IT department.

The power of Saved Search is revealed once you take advantage of aggregate summaries, formula fields and expressions.  Saved Searches drive dashboards and include formatting capacities based on data meeting particular criteria.  NetSuite uses the Oracle database to power its platform.  For those more technically oriented, you can use Oracle-based database expressions (concatenation, if-then logic, rankings, etc.) to manipulate data beyond what may be obvious from the Saved Search tool editor.

Email alerts are another one of NetSuite’s Saved Search technologies. For example, if you wish to send updated reports every hour or once a week, you can schedule to send based on certain conditions. What makes this more user-friendly is that the recipient can be anyone – they don’t have to be using NetSuite to receive these email alerts. And the email alerts have flexibility, like NetSuite reports, capable of being sent in Excel, CSV, HTML, or PDF formats. Most systems actually have a hard time being able to schedule these kinds of alerts, but it’s something built right into NetSuite.

Each Saved Search can be represented by a single hyperlink that then can be shared with other users, put on desktops, and sent in emails to allow easy access and reference.  It all works in the web tradition you have come to expect.

How NetSuite Drives Competitive Advantages

Once you understand the power of these reporting tools, the best companies will leverage these to drive competitive advantages.  For example, one of our clients wanted to drive incentive compensation based on professional resource utilization.  Each calendar quarter, they wanted their billable engineers to meet a 70% billable utilization target to drive profitability and bonus structures.  A saved search was crafted that was scheduled to run once a day.  The search looked at the utilization of all engineers.  It would send out an alert to each engineer and their respective manager when the engineer broke through the 50% (in-progress) and 70% (goal met) utilization target.  Culturally, members of the team understood what mattered and this kept the company focused on the important goal: client service.

Another client, who was positioning to move up-market, sought to drive order size from an average of $2,000 to over $10,000.  We built a saved search that would immediately send an email (an “as-it-happens” alert) to the President as soon as a sales order over $10,000 was put into the system.  The President would then pickup the phone and personally congratulate the salesperson to reinforce the company’s commitment to growth.  Salespeople would brag to one another about the phone call and it spurred a healthy form of competition within the team.  This is a good example of how companies can grow but still stay in touch with the action.

When You Want More from Built-in Reports

There are a few areas where the built-in tools may be limited.  NetSuite just offered a Pivot feature that effectively allows you to summarize like-kind row data into columns dynamically based on a Saved Search.  However, you can’t save the definition and recall it for future use.  To be really useful, this is sure to change when it is ready for general release.

If you want to have data from different sources that are distant from each other, the built-in tools may prove to be a limitation.  For example, if you want to combine unbooked and booked business into a single view, you may be required to run two reports.  We wish that you could create a one Saved Search and then reference this search from another Saved Search to effectively join distant data.  That capacity is not yet available.

If you find that these challenges are getting in your way, a third option is available called the Open Database Connector (ODBC) technology that has been around since the early days of PCs. This technology effectively opens the NetSuite system like a traditional database and allows you to connect report tools to it like Crystal Reports.  For some clients, we host Microsoft SQL Reporting services to connect up to NetSuite so they don’t have to get any IT infrastructure.

When we meet existing NetSuite customers that want more power from their tools, we often see that they have not touched the saved search or reporting environment.  Their satisfaction grows as they learn about what they can do from the built-in reporting environment.

Marty Zigman

Holding all three official certifications, Marty is regarded as the top NetSuite expert and leads a team of senior professionals at Prolecto Resources, Inc. He is a former Deloitte & Touche CPA and has held CTO roles. For over 30 years, Marty has produced leadership in ERP, CRM and eCommerce business systems. Contact Marty to set up a conversation.

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