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Complementing NetSuite’s Financial Reports with Third Party Tools

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Larger Enterprise Concerns for Financial Reporting

As organizations grow more complex, their demand for flexible financial reporting typically increase.  This is often due to a larger number of managers that are interested in business information.  A good example is a business that has many locations.  My firm recently worked with a client that has 60 different locations.  Each location is effectively a profit center.  The client divided these locations up by regions.  Four regional managers each had approximately 15 locations under their control.
Because the client’s accounting department runs on a monthly cycle consistent with management’s desire to measure performance, they feel compelled to get information ready for review as soon as possible.  One gatekeeper approach makes the accounting department responsible for information preparation and distribution.   That approach seems to be less in favor for self-service report consumption.

How NetSuite Solves Management’s Need for Information

NetSuite’s approach serves organizations well who look for self-service report consumption.  Yet, instead of everyone creating their own report, my firm advocates a methodical practice to avoid confusion.  What is important is to leverage the built-in tool capacities.

NetSuite has a powerful way to represent a location tree.  In the example above, there will be 60 locations defined with 4 locations setup as parent locations (hence regions).  If properly setup, each manager will be assigned to a particular region (location parent).

Next, a custom NetSuite workcenter can be built for reporting purposes.  While not required, we like this approach because it allows us to craft a “reporting portal” designed for management level personnel.  Here, we work closely with senior management to address their overall information dissemination objectives while keeping education and promotion costs low to produce adoption.  Meaning, we don’t want confusion in the organization about exactly which report is to be used to make interpretation.  (side note: when many people craft their own custom reports in NetSuite, it can become confusing which report to use to run the business).

The custom reporting workcenter then can be defined to a role that will honor location permissions.  What this means is that transactions that are tagged with locations that are under that manager’s permission (location parent and location children) are visible; yet all other transactions are hidden — effectively as if they don’t exist.

When you craft a financial report, you don’t filter out the locations for a particular manager.  Instead, craft the report that effectively works for all locations.  Place the report into the reporting workcenter.  Then, as a manager views the report within the special reporting role, information will effectively be filtered out.

When Role Based Reporting is Not Enough

There are other situations, however, where role based permission approaches may not work well enough.

  1. Management would like to produce a single Excel workbook: NetSuite allows an Excel export but it is a single sheet.  Manual file consolidation and packaging is required.
  2. A monthly comparison report is required by location: NetSuite’s global header definitions do not dynamically update when you request filter conditions at the footer.   Hence, when creating report outputs, like a PDF or an Excel file, you will not know the location unless you manually indicate it somewhere (file name – or Excel header).  While not a problem if you are showing a location by location comparison, it lacks when the location is implied and the comparison now is on another dimension.
  3.  More complex report formatting: NetSuite’s financial report writer is pretty good.  But if you have worked with tools that allow complete organization of the report rows and columns, you may become frustrated getting information to land where and how you want it to.
  4. Complex formulas: NetSuite financial report writer has a ways to go to define complex formulas that point to other columns as well as underlying data elements.  At this time, there is no API level capacity to manipulate the reports with script.
  5. Report distribution to other parties: NetSuite has a way to schedule reports to be emailed to users that do not have a NetSuite license — while this is a great feature, it does mean that the report must be tailored with specific filters and formatting requirements and then finally saved off separately.  If you have many reports to distribute, your list can become large and difficult to administer.
  6. Information readiness needs to be controlled: NetSuite’s real-time nature does not work well for organizations that wish to prevent viewing information unless it has been reviewed internally and blessed for consumption.

Enter Third Party Reporting Tools

Once reporting concerns become more demanding, third party offerings begin to make sense.  These tools often fall into the general category of “Business Intelligence”.  While another article could be devoted on the subject, what is important to consider are some new demands and questions that must be addressed:
  1. Do the tools require you to setup infrastructure?  NetSuite’s Cloud architecture really makes many of the IT headaches go away.  Are you going to introduce new infrastructure obligations because of your tool choices?
  2. Do the tools require extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) processes?  NetSuite’s business intelligence functionality is built-in ready to go.  Yet, third party tools may require you to do data preparation which adds information readiness latency and other potential areas for data mismatch.
  3. How will information be partitioned?  The capacity discussed to hide locations will likely all need to be setup again.  Hence, you now may need to maintain two copies of configuration data to ensure that security and data scope is properly maintained.
  4. Do the tools give you access to all the data or just a subset?  It’s great to get data out and be able to review and analyze it with popular tools such as Excel; but if the system does not pull over all the data elements you need, you may end up frustrated.
To get to that desired power, you end up taking on a new set of responsibilities — no free ride.  The good news is that there are specific third parties, such as Host Analytics and myDials, that have built automatic data integration — in fact NetSuite now has a new subscription service called NetSuite Financial Planning that leverages the popular third party Adaptive Planning system to serve companies demanding more reporting and analytic power.

Update September 2013

Very good news. I am pleased to report a breakthrough in third party NetSuite reporting using Excel. Have a look at this article.

Where have you pushed on NetSuite’s reporting tools and innovated to get data you need? Where have you given up and tried other solutions? Contact us if you are seeking more out of your NetSuite system.

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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About Marty Zigman

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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7 thoughts on “Complementing NetSuite’s Financial Reports with Third Party Tools

  1. I read your blog and I think I have a solution that actually addresses all the things that you’ve stated in your blog entry and carries it further.

    If you have time to discuss for a couple of minutes, please shoot me an e-mail (michael.chen@bibolabs.com). I think we could potentially exchange some pretty interesting dialogue.

  2. Marty Zigman says:

    Hello Michael,

    Your offering at https://www.bibolabs.com looks interesting. I do not see any reference to NetSuite. Can you suggest how you see it would work? I am not sure I see where the offer is to do financial reports (always more demanding). It feels similar to the F9 solution. Please share more so others can understand your vision.

    Marty

  3. Joan Johnson says:

    Marty,

    we run a number of store locations. We want to create a P&L for each weekly period and also be able to compare to the same week last year ( ie Thanksgiving week 2012 to Thanksgiving week 2011). We also want to run monthly P&L (ie August – include everything from 8/1 to 8/31.)

    Am i going to need to get a third party reporting tool or will i be able to manage the two different types of financial reporting periods in Netsuite?

  4. Marty Zigman says:

    Hello Joan,

    This can be done in a number of ways. The financial report writer has a mechanism to show relative dates as separate columns.

    Some folks would like different formatting than what is available from the system. For example, if you want the actual financial numbers to show up to the left of the description, and then you want last years numbers to be right of the description, it is not easily supported. Yet, most people get what they need if they live with the way NetSuite wants to format information.

    Do you need samples?

    Marty

  5. Marty Zigman says:

    Joan,

    I suggest reviewing some new capacities to produce native NetSuite financial reports (income statement, balance sheet, cash flow, budget) right in Excel. Here is a new article:

    https://blog.prolecto.com/2013/08/24/finally-netsuite-financial-statements-produced-in-excel/

    Marty

  6. We have been on NetSuite for 2 and a half years and have not found a way to iteratively run all of our location P and Ls.

    We did not implement OneWorld, but are getting ready to reformat our data structure to improve security and data access.

    We like the reports we have created for our P and L. We just need a way to run all the P and Ls at once or all our jobs at once.

    Does your software offer such capability?

    Thank you.

  7. Marty Zigman says:

    Hello Mary,

    Did you see this article? Here, you can craft all your Income Statements in Excel and then use Excel based Automation (many options there) to get your time to generate invoices to a minimum.

    Marty

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