How NetSuite Elevates Your Financial Reporting To Rockstar Status

In this video Josh explains what our CFO and Controller customers love about NetSuite's financial reporting.

     As you can see, NetSuite is highly customizable and helps make the accounting process more efficient with the ability to create, access, and customize important financial statements. Having access to income statements by department, location, class, accounting period, etc., allows you to slice and dice in real time.

     The ability to customize new fields is really helpful if you deal with alternative financial reporting structures. NetSuite has customizable functionality and segmentation to assist with automation. Another nice feature when exporting to Excel is that it maintains formatting so functions remain usable. Of course you can export to PDF, CSV, and Word or you can print, email, or even schedule reports to show up on someone's terminal daily if need be.

     We've helped our customers gain the ability to view on a subsidiary level as well as on a consolidated level where they are at any point in the month in real time. SCS Cloud is here to make your month end close a whole lot easier. 

 If you would like to find out more about how SCS Cloud can help your company expand utilizing all of the NetSuite functions email us.

Transcript:

     Hi, thanks for watching our video on NetSuites financial reporting. We want to show people what controllers, CFOs and other accounting and finance professionals love about NetSuite’s financial reporting. We're going to show that in a demo video today and hopefully you'll also love this.

     Let's start, so first of all this is a NetSuite income statement. This is totally customizable in terms of its layout and formatting, etc., but I thought this would be a great place to start because it helps to keep the end in mind when we think of financial reporting. The first thing you're going to notice is a four digit account structure; now you're not limited to four digits you could have five; you could have six, whatever is appropriate for your business. There are certainly best practices, but you will notice that the GL is just the actual GL account and doesn't have this long string that GL accounts historically have. It doesn't have 4,000.department.subsidiary.location .etc. The value of having a shorter GL string is 1: you don't have to add fifty GL accounts every time you add a department or subsidiary or location and 2: it keeps your GL much, much shorter so the maintenance and the efficiency and the effectiveness you'll see benefits from all that. 

     Now you might be saying wait a minute, I still need to record transactions by subsidiary, department, location, etc., and you certainly can. What NetSuite has done is broken those segments out from the GL string so you can think of them as separate columns in Excel, so now you can have a pivot table experience when you go to slice and dice my data to a NetSuite income statement. What does that mean or look like? Let's remember this 46 million and we'll tie that out at the end when I do this. Net net if I want to see this income statement by Department, I can change my column here to view it by department. The first thing I always do is I say does it tie out? There's that 46 million we tie out. 

     We’ll look at the column headers here, and the column headers are going to tell me how my activity periods I've selected are being transacted across these different departments. I can have whatever departments I want. This is totally customizable by each company we work with. You can have a no-department and sometimes that’s really helpful mid-month or at month end review in case you need to do allocations or make sure people are hitting the right departments from a transaction perspective. Net net I was able to slice and dice this income statement by department and all the data is gonna be in real time so as people are transacting in NetSuite all I have to do is hit my refresh button one time and I'll have the latest values. It's not like I have to wait for any type of batch process as I'm posting especially during my month end close it's really gonna speed things up. That's just an example of how it might slice it by Department. 

     Maybe I want to slice it by location, I can do that as well. You're not limited to just a couple segments. You can have as many of these segments as you want. Right out of the box. NetSuite comes with department, class, location and some others, but certainly you can add more as it's relevant for your business. They have subsidiaries too. For those companies with multiple subsidiaries this is really nice because I can see a consolidated total of my activity for that period or those periods and what I'll often do is come in here mid month to look at the activity to see how we're performing. Granted, there's often adjustments that need to be mated by intercompany transactions, etc. But I can directly understand where I am on a subsidiary level and a consolidated level mid month and that's really important. 

     Again, it's all real time so let's look at one more thing here because all the accountants are gonna ask. Yes, we also can view this by accounting period. In this case I had it set from January to December and I can view that accordingly. 

     Now let's talk a little bit more about these segments. If I want to create a brand new account this is what my screen would look like. I put in the number, the name, is it a sub-account, is it a certain type of account which has different functions in NetSuite as well as can help with groupings for financial reporting, is it a particular currency, is it a separate account which means it's a rollup and can be restricted to certain departments class location their subsidiaries and of course I can also add other fields. This is often really relevant when I have alternative financial reporting structures and I want to group things a certain way so I might control that by adding the fields to this page. 

     Let's see this in action, we talked about how to create an account, we saw how the income statement looks with those segments but if I'm actually recording a transaction here, what I have is a journal, just a very basic journal entry. I could fill my account down with those debits and credits, then you can start to see that segmentation at the line level. I can make this mandatory. I can make it available at the header and apply to all the lines. I could do it line by line so there's a lot of feature functionality. I could have this auto set on transactions based on certain business rules. There's a lot of ways to control the segmentation being recorded and it's important to think through that to make it as automated and efficient as possible so my reporting is accurate. 

     If I hover on the list of departments here you'll see that I have all the departments available that I'd like to record this transaction against so going back to the income statement that's how we're getting this view. When I look at the income displaying my department on the transaction line level, I'm recording these activities to understand how I’m doing across that particular segment. Again, in real time as people are posting transactions mid-period. 

     The other things I'll show you about financial reporting that have been very popular is that I can always export this to excel and that's pretty typical with most financial reporting tools, but one thing that NetSuite did a really good job of (this is a little bit of a creature comfort for us accountants) is they maintained the formatting so I still have things like my sums. This will save you some time and money and as you're preparing decks and and reporting, etc. Another thing is you can always export this to PDF or CSV to work with.  You can print it, you can email it, and you can schedule it as well, so if you want this report to show up on people's desks every day at 9 a.m., then they can do that. 

     This is just one example of NetSuite’s financial reporting. Looking at something as simple as an income statement but hopefully you could see that NetSuite has done a really strategic and smart job of breaking out the GL account as its own segment from the other reporting segments of the business which allows us to have that pivot table and slice and dice experience of our financial reporting and then certainly we can always see this data in real time as it refreshes. 

     If you have other questions or you'd like a personal demo please feel free to reach out we’re SCS cloud a 5-star NetSuite partner. My name is Josh LaSov and here's my email and contact information if you'd like to reach out accordingly. Thanks for your time.