For growing businesses, lack of efficiency in key systems can seriously hamper productivity and profitability. NetSuite is a powerful platform, but misconfiguring parts of it or failing to leverage key features results in inefficient processes. In this blog post, we’ll uncover five common NetSuite mistakes that businesses make, explain the negative impacts, and provide actionable solutions to resolve them. With some targeted changes, you can transform NetSuite into a driver of efficiency.
Not Taking Advantage of Multiple Book Accounting
Having robust financial reporting is crucial for smart business decisions. NetSuite gives you the ability to track financials across multiple accounts, subsidiaries, and books seamlessly in one system. However, many businesses only utilize their default book rather than configuring additional books for tracking things like budgets, deferred revenue recognition, and more granular departmental spending.
The problem? Key stakeholders end up lacking critical insights they need for forecasting, controlling expenses, recognizing revenue, and measuring performance accurately. Without multiple books set up, you also can’t take advantage of powerful NetSuite features like Advanced Revenue Management.
Solution: Set up additional books and get granular with your financial tracking. For example, have separate books to track budgets, capital expenditures, salaries expenses per department, and unbilled deferred revenue. The visibility will enable better reporting and decisions.
Not Using Saved Searches and Reports Effectively
The ability to access and analyze data is one of NetSuite’s major advantages. However, many businesses fail to maximize two pivotal tools: Saved Searches and Reports. Users rely on the same stagnant dashboard views rather than creating customized searches and reports tailored to their specific business questions and needs.
Without effectively leveraging these tools, accessing the metrics needed to run the business requires inefficient workarounds like exporting data to Excel for manipulation. This results in stale, static reporting rather than dynamic views that provide answers in real-time.
Solution: Train your team on creating targeted Saved Searches and Reports in NetSuite to extract precise data sets. Build a library of these customized tools aligned to key business questions and update them dynamically with the latest data. Empower stakeholders to answer their own questions on demand without coding skills or manual exports.
Not Automating Key Business Processes
NetSuite is packed with built-in automation capabilities that can transform manual efforts into streamlined, scalable processes. This includes trigger-based workflows on records, reminder alerts and notifications, automated reporting subscriptions, and integrations with other systems. Surprisingly, many businesses don’t automate and instead force employees to handle repetitive tasks like manually generating sales orders, sending payment reminders, updating inventory counts, producing reports, etc.
The bottom line impact? Increased overhead expenses from hiring more people to handle the manual work. Higher risk of human errors. And stalled company growth due to inefficiencies.
Solution: Identify your most resource-intensive daily tasks ripe for automation. Prioritize building them into scalable, automated processes on NetSuite. Tap resources like SuiteFlow workflow engine, SuiteAnalytics Workbook alerts, SuiteBundler document generation, and API integrations. You’ll be able to reallocate labor to high-value activities and scale without proportionally growing headcount.
Limited or No Use of Budgets and Forecasting Tools
Effectively running business finances requires planning and monitoring performance versus budgets. NetSuite offers built-in tools for both creating budgets and dynamically monitoring actual spending against them. However, businesses often launch their NetSuite system without configuring budgets. Even when budgets are loaded, comparing them to actuals requires running manual reports.
Lacking budgets means stakeholders don’t have visibility into plans for revenue, expenses, and other financial metrics. And budget vs. actual analysis falls to the wayside. Both problems make it virtually impossible to manage company finances proactively. Expenses and cash can spiral out of control without triggering alarms, leading to profit leaks.
Solution #1: Create comprehensive budgets across the appropriate categories in your Chart of Accounts. At a minimum, budget for income statement and cash flow statement line items.
Solution #2: Configure your financial reports like income statements to dynamically pull in budget vs. actual variances rather than simply reporting on actuals. Set review reminders for these key Budget vs. Actual financial statement reports.
No System Access Protocols and Permissions Strategy
As a business scales its use of NetSuite, lack of access protocols and aligned user permissions leads to inefficiency. Employees get unfettered access without enough discipline, exposing sensitive data. Users gain access to areas irrelevant for their job function, cluttering their workspace and wasting time trying to locate what they actually need. Failure to deactivate former employee accounts leaves your data vulnerable.
Together these issues decrease transparency, productivity, security, and compliance. Employees end up spending unnecessary time hunting for information without enough context for their specific role. Audits become scary rather than simple. Ultimately this bloats labor costs and opens unnecessary risks.
Solution: Align system access tightly to individual employee job responsibilities based on least privilege principles. Leverage NetSuite roles, restrict custom field visibility, limit access to specific subsidiaries/divisions, and actively manage user accounts via status and permissions. Implement Fateful to protect from orphaned users and strictly govern unsuitable access by employees. A sound access governance strategy saves countless hours wasted battling disorder.
Why Choose SuiteRep for NetSuite Implementation
SuiteRep brings deep NetSuite expertise with 200+ successful projects spanning custom configurations to global rollouts. But what truly sets us apart is our fanatical focus on customer success. Too many “partner-led” projects end in disappointment despite the software’s capabilities because the implementer lacked commitment to outcomes.
Our provenmethodology ensures you capture the benefits that influenced your NetSuite investment decision. This includes:
- Running your unique workflows and processes in the system NOT forcing adoption of plain vanilla practices
- Building fully bespoke solutions aligned to your needs NOT just enabling what NetSuite offers out-of-box
- Ensuring high user adoption NOT just technical configurations and training
- Delivering rapid time to value NOT just meeting budgets and timelines
- Providing ongoing enhancements NOT disappearing post go-live
We believe taking the time up front to thoroughly understand your business and requirements sets the stage for successful outcomes. Our NetSuite consultants pair technical know-how with pragmatic solutions that balance ideal and must-have. With deep expertise as ex-NetSuite product managers and solution consultants at NetSuite’s side, we understand how to mold the platform to run better business processes.
SuiteRep is the partner that cares as much about your business success as you do. Contact us to learn more about our unique NetSuite implementation approach.
Conclusion
NetSuite is undoubtedly a powerful business platform. But realizing its full impacts depends heavily on how successfully you leverage key capabilities specifically for your company’s benefit. Avoiding common pitfalls around process automation, customization, access governance, analytics, budgets, and more unlocks incredible efficiency gains from NetSuite.
Identify mistakes in your current NetSuite deployment such as those outlined above that actively decrease productivity.Catalog the negative effects across your business in terms of tangible outcomes like excess expenses, revenue leakage, needless labor waste, decision bottlenecks and security risks.Prioritize fixes that can be quickly implemented at relatively low complexity but with immense impactPlan your optimization initiatives across short and longer-term milestones with executive level sponsorshipEmpower champions from business teams critical to impacted processes to help guide enhancementsEngage the expertise of an implementation partner like SuiteRep to provide guidance, best practices, project leadership and development bandwidth.Act decisively on transformational improvements to see your team adopt NetSuite with enthusiasm as their efficiency engine rather than treat it as a necessary evil.
The time for realizing more value from your Enterprise Resource Planning system is now. Target the problem areas, rally your team to provide solutions input, invest resources sensibly but without overanalysis, and ultimately make NetSuite the engine propelling your business growth.