This article is relevant if you are looking to gain a better understanding of NetSuite’s approval workflows.

Background

During SuiteWorld 2019, there were a number of mentions and demonstrations about NetSuite’s SuiteApprovals. While NetSuite always offers a “Safe Harbor” statement before all of its presentations so that you do not rely heavily on information being presented, the fact that there were many mentions from different presentations shows that there is an internal push inside the organization to offer up enhanced approval practices.

As my firm is a NetSuite Systems Integrator, we are often called upon to help our clients produce approval workflows. We have known for some time that NetSuite has offered an add-on product called “SuiteSolutions Advanced Approvals” as it had been presented at previous SuiteWorld events. The SuiteSolutions group is NetSuite’s internal software development team organized to bring productized offerings to the NetSuite community. Recently, NetSuite has now made, free of license charge, all of the SuiteSolutions offerings available (see SuiteAnswer Article) to existing NetSuite customers. As such, the free license makes it much easier to evaluate the software offering.

Our firm is well positioned to make assessments about these kinds of tools. For the last 10+ years, we have helped many clients implement approval style workflows. There are general patterns to address approval workflow concerns. To understand these patterns can help you develop your own requirements so that you can assess the effort to implement your approval workflow.

Evaluating NetSuite’s SuiteSolutions Advanced Approvals

You may be seeking to “get your hands on the software” so you can dive in and understand NetSuite’s Advance Approvals. I asked one of our senior consultants, Elie C., to help produce an assessment so that our larger team could evaluate the software’s capacities. At the time of this writing, we found that there is confusion in-and-outside of NetSuite about the various approval module offerings; as such, we produced videos to help you assess the different options to help you get centered.

Part 1: NetSuite Approval Offerings Orientation and Assessment

Note, the video will go over NetSuite’s different modules and contrast them.

Part 2: NetSuite SuiteSolutions Advanced Approvals Demonstration

At the time of this publication, we are still crafting the video for your review. Please standby.

General SuiteSolutions Advanced Approvals Assessment

Based on our evaluation, we think the SuiteSolutions Advanced Approvals is a good general purpose tool to help with moderately complex approval situations. We actively have four clients that seek to have approval workflows implemented and the tool, on its own, will not exactly meet our clients’ requirements. As such, at least at this point in time, related to what NetSuite offers to produce approval flows, I think it is important to consider the following:

1. Start with the Advanced Approvals Framework: NetSuite’s prior approval workflow offerings are all subordinate compared to the new Advanced Approvals flows. While it takes more configuration effort, the flexibility to model business situations is much greater than the old approaches.
2. Plan to Retire Older SuiteFlow Workflows and Early Flagging Systems: over time, once you understand the SuiteSolutions Advanced Approvals flows, consider retiring the old SuiteFlow workflows so that you have a more consistent user experience. This will also make it easier to perform ongoing refinements that invariably will emerge as your organization evolves.
3. Expect Challenges: manage your expectations and prepare for situations where the tools, out of the box, do not have enough capacity. Be both skeptical and inventive to address your requirements with these tools. Aspects of the tool, especially the Dynamic Rules, can provide a pathway to break through a requirements barrier.
4. Future (Safe-Harbor) NetSuite Approval Applications: Finally, some sneak-preview tools were demonstrated at SuiteWorld 2019 that simply are not available today. The tools appeared closer to the new user interface that is now available in the Suite Analytics Workbooks. This likely means that another framework may emerge that is superior to the tools offered today — who knows if there will be backward compatibility.

General Pattern for Addressing Approval Workflows

In general, as you develop your requirements, you may want to consider these broad categories to help you think and get organized. We often find that even when our clients say “it’s simple”, it often is not.

1. Overall Control Consideration: what is the fundamental concern you seek to address? Are you basically making sure that a commitment to a certain value amount should inform key decision makers as it will impact the business in a meaningful manner? Or might you be inventing an approval flow because you have not modeled well your actual people practices and supporting business systems to collect information well and thus you need a trusted actor to watch and monitor compliance to business rules? Many times, these concerns can be much more intelligently managed through proper record state definition and rule evaluation. Consider my article, Learn how to Manage any NetSuite Record by Exception.
2. Record States: How will records evolve over their useful lifecycle? What distinguishes each state and what criteria is used to evaluate? NetSuite’s offered model is the basic “Not Approved” / “Approved” and a currency unit (dollar) value. Yet there may other attributes needed to describe the situation. In addition, you may want to consider that NetSuite’s “approved” state machine may produce unneeded or extra work in accrual accounting. See my article Best Practices: NetSuite Vendor Bill Approvals
3. Approval Hierarchy: how will you express the approval rule hierarchy so that when the record is in a specific state, the right actors are expected to act? Many times, rules seem simple — but when you try to express them logically via a spreadsheet matrix, you may discover it’s not as simple as first imagined. If you can’t express them via a spreadsheet in a clear manner, it’s probably going to be difficult to configure and test. NetSuite offers the concept of Dynamic rules and these are one of the areas to unlock potential in the application.
4. Rule Override and Delegation: What will be the mechanism for someone to override the approval chain? There are times an executive needs to “get it out the door” and should not be bound or stuck due to the system not releasing the record. What do you do when a named manager is not available, such as on vacation?
5. Are Users in NetSuite?: as much as I am an advocate for “getting the whole company on NetSuite”, there are many organizations that need approvals from folks that are not licensed users. How will you present a list of matters that need to be approved by managers that are not using NetSuite? Yes, an email is a good notification, but how many managers and executives are drowning in emails that need to be responded to? They need a list so they can “get it done”.

Considerations for SuiteSolutions Advanced Approvals

During our evaluations for four of our Prolecto clients, we could see that Prolecto has already invented algorithms that are superior to NetSuite’s. This is not to say that we are trying to promote our tools — we don’t charge for our software so we really are indifferent; our model is to start with what NetSuite offers and if they can’t do it, we go to work. We just need to be prepared to lower risk and ensure we are producing value when we choose a course of action. While this can change at any time with NetSuite enhancing its offerings, we discovered the following:

1. Transaction Subtypes: the approval rule definitions are distinguished by transaction type (e.g., Purchase Order) and subsidiary. We have clients that have completely different workflows for Inventory and Research and Development Purchase Orders. Time to become inventive.
2. NetSuite Roles vs. Other Roles: The approval workflows make heavy assumptions about the hierarchies and roles defined within NetSuite’s model. Yet, there are many situations where NetSuite’s built-in model serves one purpose but may contradict a different business reality. What if you need to get two signatures from any people that are holding a specific role not expressed in NetSuite? NetSuite offers a concept called Parallel Approvers but you may find it tricky to express.
3. Anticipated Approval Stack: The model always shows the next approver. But if a transaction needs to go through multiple approvals steps, it’s not easy to see the anticipated approver stack — thus one may be in wonder or become surprised when you get an approval from the next designated approver but then learn that “yet another approver” is needed.
4. Trumping Rules: There is one named Super User who can trump and approve all transactions. But what do you do if you want a different type of hierarchy who can approve depending on a role?
5. Limited to NetSuite Status Model: the tool assumes NetSuite’s status model such as “Pending Approval”, “Pending Receipt”. Yet, what if you need more nuance and/or seek to invent a different state machine? Note, we solved that challenge in our Record State Manager model.

Get Expert NetSuite Approvals Assistance

In this article, I hope I have helped you become more centered around NetSuite’s approval workflow offerings. We are enthusiastic about the availability of the software and we have declared that all new approval implementations will at least start here — just like we do with all of our client situations — we start with what NetSuite offers and then use our capacity to innovate to bring new or previously built power to our clients. If this article was valuable to you, I recommend signing up for notifications of new articles. If you are ready to tackle your NetSuite driven approval challenge, let’s have 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.

More Posts - Website - Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - YouTube