Quickly Determine NetSuite’s Account Transaction Line Usage Counts

This article is relevant if you need a quick summary of the number of transactions in your NetSuite account.

Background

NetSuite’s idea of one single system to run your business is compelling. To achieve this vision, it takes a commitment to model all aspects of your organization’s business concerns so that the native NetSuite system can be enhanced to accommodate all the necessary records to achieve the single system vision.

We help clients achieve this vision. Thus, we generally advise our clients to drive as many transactions as possible into the NetSuite system to help get maximum value from the single system vision. If done well, we would have all the transaction attributes we need to produce rich management and financial reporting. With a number of license-free tools we give our clients, we can avoid the need for a third-party data warehouse to get around any built-in NetSuite reporting tool challenge.

In 2020, Oracle moved to a new service tier pricing model and changed the value equation for the single system vision. With this new service tier model, we now must ask ourselves about the number of transactions we desire to push into the NetSuite ERP system. If we trigger a forced service tier upgrade, the return on our single system investment vision now is less. Accordingly, we are now in regular conversations about this forced service tier upgrade concern.

To become centered in these transaction count service tier conversations, we need a quick way to find out how many transactions we are producing. NetSuite’s Help documentation offers a video as a way to produce a SuiteAnalytics Workbook to help inspect the value transaction set that is generating the official monthly transaction line count (see the Billing Information page at Setup > Company > NetSuite Account Information > View Billing Information).

The challenge is that it takes some time to set up that Analytics workbook up.  Furthermore, the Help document offers that there is a SuiteApp that can provide this information. Yet, at the time of this writing, it does not appear to be published (or easily found).

Use NetSuite Saved Search to Produce Transaction Line Inspection

The good news is that Saved Search can give us a reasonable approximation of transaction information that drives the monthly transaction line metric.  Instead of a Transaction search, summarizing the Transaction Numbering Audit Log Saved Search object can produce what we need.  Click the images to see the resulting Saved Search and the definition page.

Alternatives to High Transaction Line Counts

While I will not go into depth on what patterns are possible to avoid the forced service tier upgrade, the key to this challenge is to begin to think of how to use NetSuite to link to sub-ledger systems that are not producing the transactions line counts yet in a manner that still drives the benefits of the single system vision. Non-posting-based custom records can work quite well if they are carefully integrated into the entire transaction model.

Obtain the Netsuite Transaction Line Usage Saved Search

To help accelerate the NetSuite end-user community’s ability to understand NetSuite’s transaction line usage, we added this summary saved search to our Prolecto Financial Saved Search Library.  The Financial Saved Search library was designed to answer questions that demand more complex saved search definitions.  This transaction summary search is less complete but is available more for convenience.  Simply make a request for the Saved Search by providing a reference to your account ID, and we will provide the tool to your account without requesting a license charge.

If you found this article relevant, feel free to sign up for notifications to new articles as I post them. If you are challenged by Oracle’s Transaction counts and service tiers, 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.

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