NetSuite 2022.1 – A review of the top ten new feature highlights from leading partner Eureka Solutions

The latest NetSuite release is being rolled out to all users as we speak, so we asked Alan Miles, our NetSuite Sales Director, to review all the great new features and pick out his top ten, based on what will make the greatest difference to our customers.

All businesses using NetSuite are scheduled be upgraded between February and April 2022, and as usual all customers are upgraded in phases, automatically benefitting from the new functionality without the need for an upgrade process or any downtime.

Number 10 – Project 360 Dashboard

This relates to service-based businesses. If you use NetSuite’s project management functionality you will already have a project dashboard in the system, and the Project 360 Dashboard his is an upgraded version which will give project managers and anyone else that needs to analyse projects a workspace for doing so. The upgrade of the dashboard provides features like an overview of crucial project information; advanced KPI monitoring to be able to look at things like actual versus budget for projects and add estimated and baseline budgets in terms of budget versions for projects; and being able to look at things like utilisation of resources from the dashboard.

There is a new element called ‘Focus Pages’ which allows us to segment and look at a more detailed KPI view for projects, and there are also links within the dashboard for ‘exception’ type alerts to allow you to take corrective action, for example, where there is over- or under-utilisation or projects have exceeded budgets. This is all aimed at making project managers’ lives a bit easier in terms of what is going on with projects in the system.

Number 9 – Invoice Presentation Templates

Number 9 also relates to the service management side of things, for project-based businesses primarily. Invoice Presentation Templates allow you to customise sales invoice templates per customer or project, enabling you to provide a bit of context along with the invoices or specific information for particular projects on invoice templates. It includes an option to include a backing sheet to provide details of timesheets, expenses and even supplier invoices, e.g., for subcontractor type activities which are being billed to the client.

This functionality makes it a lot easier to have custom, multiple templates for customers and projects.

Number 8 – CSV Import for Employee Expenses

A more generic feature this one – the ability to import employee expenses into the system. Currently, expenses can be imported directly from credit card providers (Amex as standard, others require customisation) and then fed into employee expense claims to help populate them quickly. But that just helps to populate the employees expenses a bit quicker. What is being launched in 2022.1 is the option to do that import via a csv file, so you don’t need to connect directly to the card provider. Credit card and any other expenses can be imported via csv to an imported expenses table, which allows the employee to then create their expense claim in a more streamlined fashion.

Number 7 – SuitePeople Enhancements

The SuitePeople module is NetSuite’s HR solution, which was launched in the UK in mid-2021 and provided some HR functionality relating to employee reviews, time-off requests and performance management. In NetSuite 2022.1 there will be some enhancements to this module, mostly around the performance management side of things, including some advanced options for being able to schedule performance reviews (so every month, or every six months, for example, or a year after joining). There is also now a ‘Manager Digest’ feature, so managers can receive a monthly email sent to them summarising team achievements in relation to goals, areas of focus and performance reviews, tying into the goal management and performance management functionality.

At Eureka Solutions we hope to be running specific webinars on SuitePeople for HR later in the year, so watch this space!

Number 6 – Inventory Management Enhancements

For anybody who’s using the system for stock management and order management, there are various enhancements in NetSuite 2022.1. The first one that we picked out is supplier performance analysis, where the system will now use artificial intelligence to analyse the performance of your suppliers, applying scores to suppliers which will be based on a historic transaction analysis of their delivery times on their purchase orders, which can be used to calculate ‘predicted days late’ for new POs (or early). The purpose of this is to warn you when you are doing your buying or forward planning, that you might need to consider placing orders early, or to use an alternative supplier.

Another inventory management feature we wanted to highlight is the Supply Allocation Pop-Up Window. If you are using the system for software management and haven’t yet reviewed the supply allocation feature, you might want to consider it. It was introduced relatively recently and allows you to set more detailed rules and validation on allocations of stock to sales orders, and that includes the ability to assign and allocate future stock to sales transactions, for example, incoming purchase orders or transfers from other locations, so that means you can do more forward planning for how stock is going to be allocated once it does become available. This gives you more visibility and the ability to drill down into the sales transactions that the items on POs have been assigned to, so that you can reallocate or give more insight to customers as to when things are due.

Number 5 – Linked Datasets in Analytics Workbooks

The Analytics Workbooks feature within NetSuite allows users to create pivot tables and charts based on data within the system and pull them through to dashboards, or use the workbooks for advanced reporting. These are continuously being updated with lots of features in every release, and this is one that we have been waiting for – the ability to analyse data that isn’t necessarily in the same tables, or is related to other information.

Currently, you can include multiple datasets (e.g., transactions, budgets employee information), but each table, pivot or chart can only include data from a single dataset – to combine them requires scripting. With release 2022.1 users can create links between datasets in the user interface, to combine figures into one chart or pivot table in a workbook. Use cases will typically include analysing actual versus budget figures, and potentially analysing multiple budgets. This is something we at Eureka Solutions are going to thoroughly test, so if you want to find out how that went, do reach out.

Another use case would be comparing financial and non-financial data – for example, employee information or customer service information from support cases, versus financial information – to do more financial analysis based on statistics. This small change is very powerful in terms of providing more detailed reporting and insights.

Number 4 – UK VAT Reporting Enhancements

(Note that there are enhancements for other jurisdictions as well, but we’ll focus on the UK for the purposes of this blog.)

There are some new reports relating to the Intrastat, which was updated due to Brexit. In the new release there will now be three reports relating to Arrivals for Intrastat reporting: one valid for transactions before 2021 leading up to Brexit; one for 2021 specifically; and one for 2022 onwards.

The UKVAT 100 report for VAT returns has also been updated; it now includes the reduced rate for hospitality and the boxes have been updated to make sure that feeds into the right place on the return, and Box 6 has also been updated to properly report the EU One Stop Shop (OSS) tax code type.

Number 3 – Customer Scheduled Upgrades

For now, Number 3 comes with a bit of a caveat. We’ve included it in our countdown because it is in the Release Notes, but it’s currently as a pilot for a limited selection of customers. It’s only currently available to those customers and the information and exact process is still quite limited for the moment. This is part of NetSuite’s move to Oracle’s infrastructure.

Any new customers that have signed up to NetSuite in the last couple of years will likely already be on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure in terms of the data centre. With the last couple of releases, customers have been able to reschedule maintenance updates from within their NetSuite account – these have been limited to database upgrades, moving from NetSuite’s data centre to Oracle’s, and routine scheduled maintenance such as bug fixes.

With 2022.1, some customers already on the Oracle data centre will have the option to reschedule their main upgrades from within the system. This is by invite only for the purposes of the pilot.

Number 2 – Payment Link for Donations

This change will be of interest to any non-profit organisation that wishes to be able to take donations. Last Autumn, release 2021.2 saw the addition of the Payment Link feature, which allows customers to pay sales invoices directly via card/PayPal using a link on the invoice or invoice email, and the payment is automatically applied to the invoice in NetSuite.

This has been extended in the new release to capture donations for non-profit organisations, entailing a payment link generated from NetSuite (which doesn’t need to be associated with an invoice) that can be added to your website or sent in emails and will enable donors to donate online – choosing the amount, the payment method, whether it is one off or recurring, and whether to associate it with a particular program or project. A really nice new feature!

Number 1 – Cash 360 Dashboard

Our final feature to highlight is a pretty big enhancement. It doesn’t appear at the time of writing in the release notes, but is listed as one of the key main features in the sneak peeks and promotion around the new release. The Cash 360 Dashboard is a new, configurable dashboard that is dedicated to cash management and short-term cash flow forecasting.

Quite similar in concept to the Project 360 dashboard that we highlighted at the beginning of the blog, this will include: links and shortcuts to activities related to cash management – whether it’s bank rec or recording payments or any other functionality related to the cash side of things; reminders of cash related tasks that need to be taken care of, like deposits or payments; giving an insight into current cash balances, accounts payable and accounts receivable. While you may think this is the type of information you can already have on your dashboard at the moment, this dashboard combines the information with things like cash flow trends and a rolling six-month cash-flow forecast. Cash flow forecasting combines multiple data points, like new funding sources and when they are due in, planned expenditures, billing schedules and sales forecasts. It will combine that data with the open AR and AP transactions and their due dates to work out estimated outgoing and incomings in terms of cash.

The plan is that instead of just using the payment terms on the AP and AR transactions on the sales and purchase invoices, historical averages based on AP/AR transactions are then applied to estimate collection and disbursement dates. This means the forecast will be more accurate.

So, that brings us to the end of our top ten feature highlight countdown for NetSuite 2022.1, which we hope you’ll agree has some great new functionality.

If you are not yet using NetSuite and this has piqued your interest, we’d be delighted to have a chat with you about whether the system will be a good fit for your requirements, so please get in touch.

Likewise, if you are already using NetSuite and feel you could be getting more out of the system, we’d be happy to talk you through your options.

Please contact Richard Christie, Business Systems Executive, for more information on 01355 581960 or richard.christie@eurekasolutions.co.uk, or fill in the adjacent website enquiry form.