Quickly Assess NetSuite License Usage

This article is relevant if you would like a convenient way to see which NetSuite employees are using licenses and are actively using the application.

Background

As NetSuite charges for licenses for per-employee access to the platform, it is important to assess who is actively using the application to optimize the distribution of licenses into the user community. Thus, it makes sense to have a convenient method to make an assessment of license usage.

Employee List View

A quick method to understand which employees are using the application involves modifying the default view when displaying a user list. This way, it becomes convenient.

Here is what to do:

Modify the View so that you can produce an aggregate (summary) of information based on the last login date. Learn about the frequency of user logins to understand which users rarely use the application, who may be having trouble, and which users may be candidates to reassign licenses.

Criteria Information

Modify the following criteria information:

1. Login Access: Set to True
2. Login Audit Trail: Status: Join the Login Audit Trail to the status where it equals “Success”

This will give you the employees that are currently have been assigned a license and who have successfully logged in.  Using criteria in this manner will make the system be the default definition. However, we will manipulate filters to give us more flexibility (explained below).

Click the image to get a view of the setup.

Result Information

Modify the following criteria information:

1. Name: group by (summary) name
2. Email: group by (summary) email address
3. Login Audit Trail : Date: use two summary rows: one to produce the maximum and the other to produce a count. Use the Summary label to express the differences in a nice format.

Click image to get a view of the setup.

Available Filters Information

To provide more flexibility in the analysis, we will modify the saved search filter definition. We will use the Available Filters tab so that we can see all the users that have been granted a license but may not have successfully logged in.

Click image to get a view of the setup.

A Simple but Incomplete License Usage View

The good news is that the technique above is easy and quick to set up. The weakness in the model is that it may not fully illustrate who is using a valuable NetSuite license. While we focused on the employee list, it is possible to assign licenses to non-employees such as vendors or customers. This technique will not show non-employee license usage — however, it is possible to create similar views on each of those entities in a similar fashion.

Note, with the release of SuiteQL, we can practice developing our NetSuite-based SQL skills to write an entity search that will inform us on all the entities that consume NetSuite licenses in one query. In due course, I will write a subsequent article on how this can be done.

If you found this article relevant, feel free to sign up for notifications to new articles as I post them. If you looking to get control over your usage of NetSuite, let’s have a conversation.