Introduction

Scheduled reports are a great way to provide your NetSuite end users with actionable data, in a familiar, digestible format, on a cadence that works for them. Despite this, scheduled reports continue to be underutilized today.

As your NetSuite user base grows, not only in number, but across business functions, it is important to provide timely insights to the broad group of stakeholders. In some cases, it can support collaboration across these business functions. The accounts receivable area is a great example of this.

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The request

You have been asked by your accounts receivables stakeholders to provide your sales organization with details on outstanding AR on a frequent basis.

More specifically, it has been requested that the sales organization be made aware of any potential customer issues, so they can be promptly addressed from a customer service perspective.

Today, the accounts receivable team is extracting AR aging reports from NetSuite (manually), carving out the necessary data points and distributing the data to sales managers, for their respective teams.

Here are the requirements:

1. Every Monday morning, send a report to all sales managers that includes only their team’s respective AR aging details.
2. The report should be in a consistent format and grouped by sales rep.
3. The report should be in Excel format, so that sales managers can update as necessary.

With these requirements, how should you think through solutioning? Let’s explore.

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The thought process

As I read through the requirements there are some key things that catch my attention.

1. The report is to be sent to sales managers and grouped by sales rep. We should confirm if both data points exist today in NetSuite and if so, are they present on the customer record or invoice record (or both). If the data points are not available, we would need to consider how to get that data into NetSuite efficiently.
2. The report timing is very specific, as is the format. Fortunately, NetSuite’s report scheduling capabilities can accommodate both.

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Salto Tip: Don’t make assumptions with days/times given. Consider users in different countries and time zones to see how they would be impacted. Users in Asia might not be happy waiting until late Monday night for their report if reports are sent out during Monday morning PST business hours.

3. As the report has been requested to include AR aging details, it would make sense to leverage that reporting in NetSuite vs attempting to build a saved search.
4. As the report should be specific to each sales manager, the solution will require multiple scheduled reports, one for each sales manager.

Now that we have thought through the requirements, it’s time to execute the plan.

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The execution

Step 1 - Playback requirements

Before jumping into solution design it is essential that you fully understand your end user requirements. Take the time to review and even challenge the requirements where it makes sense. Consider whether an interactive approach should be taken in order to first stand up a basic solution and in the future optimize.

One of the more typical requests is for NetSuite customizations to happen in real time, when in reality many of these customizations can be executed on a schedule.

In this specific use case, make sure you understand who needs to receive the report. Is it just the sales managers or should additional reports be sent out to sales reps? How often do the reports need to be sent and what data points are required?

Add value to the discussion by confirming whether it would be more valuable to only present transactions that are 45+ days overdue, for example. In some cases, less is more.

You can also see if the sales managers would be open to a different report format (e.g. saved search) IF they were able to have live updates on their NetSuite dashboard vs waiting for a weekly email.

Always plan for change - what will happen is a sales manager or sales rep changes on a particular customer or transaction in the future? Answer these questions before getting to a recommended solution.

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Step 2 - Solution design

The solution for this request could look different for NetSuite customers. Some customers leverage NetSuite CRM and have sales managers and sales reps configured in their environment already. Other customers who leverage a CRM external to NetSuite should consider creating custom fields to capture the sales managers and sales reps for each customer (or transaction) depending upon their business processes. Let’s assume in this case they are captured at the customer level.

However you capture these data points, the result is the same. A number of scheduled AR aging reports that are filtered to specific sales managers that are scheduled to run every Monday morning.

In summary, the solution requires the following customizations:

• Custom entity fields to capture both the sales manager and sales rep on customer records
• Custom AR aging reports that filter results based upon the sales manager and sorted by sales rep
• Multiple scheduled reports, each filtered to a specific sales manager

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Review the solution design with your stakeholders before moving into the build phase of the project.

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Step 3 - Execution and deployment

Now that you are ready to deploy your reporting solution, it would be advisable to first test with one sales manager. It is important to double check the configuration, especially if we are going to be providing financial reports and data outside of NetSuite.

Deploying NetSuite solutions manually can take a significant amount of time depending upon the amount of customization needed. With all of the moving parts it is all to easy for a NetSuite Administrator to miss something. Fortunately, NetSuite provides a number of out of the box solutions such as SuiteBundler, Copy to Account and SuiteCloud Development Framework (SDF) to support this process. Each of these solutions has its own pros and cons, so you will need to review these to see which makes the most sense depending upon the complexity of the customization and your skillset.

Another solution to consider for deploying these NetSuite customizations is Salto. Salto is a SuiteApp that empowers NetSuite Administrators and Developers by facilitating faster deployment of these solutions. Salto has the added benefits of providing environment comparisons as well as allowing for simple version rollbacks in the event of something unexpected occurring.

Now that you have deployed the solution to Production, the final step is to make sure you have a process going forward to support new sales managers who join your business, so that they can start to receive the same reporting automation as their peers.

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Useful references for this custom solution

• Financial report customization
• Scheduling a report
• Salto Leap - Master NetSuite Financial Data (enroll for free)

For more information on expanding your NetSuite toolkit and how to think like a NetSuite Pro, check out Salto’s blog posts that explore some of the things that NetSuite Developers and NetSuite Administrators should be leveraging within the NetSuite ecosystem.

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Final thoughts

Scheduling reporting in NetSuite is a great way to achieve automation. You are able to set up the schedule and let NetSuite run thereafter, providing actionable data to your end users.

This does come with the burden of additional maintenance - to deactivate scheduled reports when users leave the company and setting up new scheduled reports for new hires. Don’t forget to bake these processes into your onboarding and offboarding processes for NetSuite users, then it just becomes part of the process vs something you have to try and remember.

If you are not making use of the report scheduling feature in NetSuite, it might be time to start!