4 Ways NetSuite Helps Growing Businesses

Hiring new employees, developing new products and gaining more customers are just some of the exciting outcomes of growth. What is often overlooked, however, is the basic accounting system that is still expected to meet the new needs of the business effectively.

First, let’s look at some of the influencing economy-related factors.

While basic accounting systems, whether legacy or cloud-based like QuickBooks and Xero, are well respected within their own right, they only provide the basic functionality expected for a small business. With this in mind, there’s only so many new employees and new clients that these accounting systems can handle because they lack the powerful infrastructure needed to support and encourage growth. With hindsight, finance leaders often find that the low cost of maintaining these systems masks the costs of inefficiencies in completing routine tasks like the monthly close or, more importantly, devaluing the data required to make informed strategic business decisions. Ultimately, these accounting solutions can make even the most experienced finance leaders feel under pressure.

In comparison, I’d like to give you an insight into how NetSuite helps businesses grow as the leading cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system globally. It’s used by over 28,000 companies of all sizes, with many of them implementing it as a start-up and continuing to use it as an established business. For example, 65% of tech IPOs since 2011 are NetSuite customers. Here are 4 ways that NetSuite can help your company achieve sustainable growth.

1. Born in the Cloud

NetSuite itself was born in the cloud, and has never been an on-premise product, thus making it accessible to anybody with a web connected device, wherever they may be at that time. Its role-based functionality ensures that the user only has access to what they need. As such, when everybody was forced to work from home, NetSuite users could easily continue what they’d been working on in the office without the need to physically be there.

Being born in the cloud allows NetSuite to update the system twice per year without any downtime and is typically executed in stages to prevent any bugs. This means that all users will benefit from the latest technology without any added cost or headaches to upgrade the entire system. For an example of what to expect from these updates, we’ve covered them in this blog – NetSuite 2023.1 – A Review of the Top Ten Feature Highlights.

2. One Unified Platform

As companies grow, they’ll find themselves purchasing new software often, each designed for specific functions in different departments. While this might seem like the logical, step by step process of growth, it creates data siloes, accessible only by those within the department. As such, critical information such as customers, orders and inventory are spread across disparate systems, requiring someone to manually collate the data from each system which is awfully time consuming and leaves room for error. NetSuite however, although most popular for its financial capabilities, provides an infrastructure for the whole organisation with modules for each department such as HR, CRM, eCommerce, WMS and more. This means that you can access all your up-to-the-minute data in seconds, and trust that it’s authentic without mistakes.

3. Automated Reporting

Having one unified platform which hosts all your data, there’s no longer a need to pull in data from disconnected databases and spreadsheets to begin creating your reports. In fact, you won’t need to create anything. NetSuite automates as much of your processes as possible, with over 150 pre-built reports and KPIs which can be viewed immediately from your dashboard. These reports provide the visibility required to make data-led decisions, with the ability to view information such as operating profit at company wide level, then drill down to subsidiaries and even further to individual invoices, depending on your role, of course.

Automation frees up your finance and operations teams dramatically. It’s easiest to highlight NetSuite’s efficiency with some NetSuite customer statistics:

• Finance teams reduced close time by 40-70%.
• Finance staff’s productivity increased by 20-50%.
• Users experienced between 50-80% increase in self-reported actionable insights.

As such, this allowed finance and operations leaders to spend more time on strategic decision making and less time fighting fires, hunting for spreadsheets, and making sure that their data is even accurate. Moreover, if the team is more efficient, you can grow without the need to hire new staff.

4. Built for Expansion

When aspiring for growth, it’s natural to research opportunities in new markets further from home. Whether it’s opening up a new store, acquiring a foreign company, or developing your supply chain in a foreign country, you’ll likely fall at the first hurdle while using a basic accounting system like Xero. Their stubbornness in only supporting one currency means not only will you have to find a work around for exchanging foreign currencies for your financial reporting, there’s even deeper issues within foreign regulations such as taxes which aren’t the same as the in UK.

NetSuite supports over 190 different currencies that reflect the daily exchange rates and adheres to international tax structures, allowing you to consolidate your financial reports across multiple business units. Moreover, NetSuite ensure to update users’ systems to comply with any changes in tax regulation, maintaining a clean audit trail which is required for any IPOs and favourable for investment. The multi-language user interface also facilitates transparency between foreign subsidiaries which language barriers would normally obstruct. Plus, the ability to drill down into international subsidiaries means that, for example, the CFO in the UK can be on a call with the head of finance in Spain and view the same report, in real time, in their native languages.

The Last System You’ll Ever Need

At Eureka Solutions, we often say that NetSuite is the last system you’ll ever need. Many customers who started off as small businesses still use it today, as it has grown incrementally with each user. While I’ve highlighted the main features that makes NetSuite a favourable ERP system to boost growth, please feel free to check out our webinar recording – NetSuite for Fast Growing Businesses – which will show a demo of NetSuite’s user interface and functionality.

Eureka Solutions is a 5-star NetSuite Partner and was named NetSuite Partner with Outstanding Performance of the Year for the UK and Ireland in 2021, based on the success achieved for customers. They are also a leading Sage 200 Partner with one of the most technically proficient business solutions teams in the country, so are ideally placed to talk through your challenges with referenceable examples – contact Richard Christie, Business Systems Specialist, on 01355 581960 or richard.christie@eurekasolutions.co.uk.