Avoid a Mess: Learn NetSuite Best Practices for Management Reporting

This article is relevant if you use NetSuite and are seeking to improve your management reporting and information distribution capacities.

NetSuite Management Reporting Best Practices

Consider the following situation and a best practice approach to enjoy NetSuite reports.

The Reporting / Saved Search Mess

There are a number of practices that you can institute to produce powerful reports in NetSuite.  NetSuite likes to promote the power of its tools to allow end users to craft, execute and distribute their own management reports. While this software architecture is powerful, in many organizations, a number of issues often emerge unless you develop good operational practices.  Have you witnessed this in your NetSuite implementation?

1. The number of custom reports and saved searches grow dramatically. Each of these reports will be created with different naming conventions, configurations and criteria.
2. A bunch of reports will be marked “Public” and “Show Reports in Menu” which will show up for all other users effectively polluting end user menu structures.
3. Different criteria and naming conventions for the same report will cause people to become confused about which report to review and reference. Information between reports will not tie out and effort will be required to explain the differences.
4. People will not be able to find reports easily because they will stumble trying to call them up by name. Permissions settings will often hide reports from the global search lookup frustrating you and wasting your time when you know indeed the reports and searches are defined.
5. End user confusion and frustration sets in. Complaining is common. Ultimately, management realizes they have a mess to clean up and they become disappointed that their investment in NetSuite, and its promise for real-time information, is not being realized.

NetSuite Reporting and Saved Search Best Practices

The practice described here does not try to use an iron fist approach to police others and lock down capacities. The lock down mentality is one of the weaknesses of “Big IT” and frankly seems to be against the culture of Cloud Computing. In a lock down world, end-users feel they are not heard or empowered.  Instead, develop a practice to produce and distribute reports that are “certified” as trustworthy that saves everyone time.  Consider the following practice:

Create a new NetSuite “Reporting” workcenter to drive the exact tab and menu layout structure that is thoughtful and meaningful to your organization. For example, you could create a tab for every department with a special menu layout that reflects different functions of the business.  The idea is that you will drive end users to the new “Reporting” workcenter to get information that has been carefully designed, crafted and verified for trustworthiness.  The reporting workcenter will develop a common company language within your organization to talk about about reports.

1. Leverage NetSuite Department, Location, and Class dimensions and their related sub structures. Where you can, define hierarchies to model your organization.
2. Create a new NetSuite security role for the distribution of these reports. For example, call your new role “Executive Reporting”. Assign your well-designed reports and saved search audience permissions to your new security role. Make it so that the reporting center only has read only permissions and limit the permissions to modify searches and reports.
3. If you want to have NetSuite hide data based on Department / Location / Class, create a similar NetSuite Security Role, such as “Executive Reporting – Department”, or “Executive Reporting – Location”. In these role definitions, reference your new “Reporting” workcenter but this time apply department, location or class dimension permissions to tell NetSuite how to hide information based on the employee’s assigned department / location or class as defined within their employee profile.
4. Link your employee and manager roles to these dimensions and apply hierarchies where ever possible to prepare for report roll ups and visibility / masking opportunities.
5. For ease of report development, maintenance and lookup, create a convention to name your saved searches and reports to make it easy to find them. You may want to use a “TYPE: TIME” naming convention. For example, you can name a report “Sales: MTD vs. PY” and another, “Purchase: Current Year”. This will facilitate quick look up and list sorting.
6. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, NetSuite doesn’t have a good way to attach extra descriptive (or meta) information about the report. It would be great to descriptively record the purpose, special considerations and other explanations to help end users understand what to consider as they review reports. At the same time, leverage the fact that reports and saved searches use an internal number that is visible from the NetSuite URL. The URL can be passed between people in email and it makes it easy to quickly pull up the right report.
7. As you develop a report, carefully assign it to the “Reporting” workcenter by using NetSuite Category definitions to make it land exactly where you want. Avoid using department / location / class dimension in the report criteria to allow the power of role-based work center definitions to apply information the way you need.
8. In a similar fashion, within each “Reporting” workcenter tab, use the space as a dashboard to draw portlets of information and graphs. These information portlets too will respect your department / location / role dimension definitions.
9. Assign employees to the role that should receive reports. As employees need a particular report, they can switch NetSuite roles and quickly find the information they need.

Summary

The suggested practice does not remove power from your end user community. Instead, it provides a low-cost mechanism to drive users to see the same screens, develop a common language for talking about business performance, and will increase your company’s satisfaction with their NetSuite business system.

If you are thinking about improving your NetSuite reporting practices to improve the payoff of your NetSuite investment, contact me for a conversation.

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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