NetSuite 2020.1 Release: What to Expect

The much-anticipated half-yearly upgrade rollout from NetSuite for year 2020 is just around the corner, and you may be wondering what’s in store for your business. Jam-packed with new features and enhancements, NetSuite’s 2020.1 upgrade is designed to bring maximum business impact for their 19000-plus customers globally. The team at Tvarana has put together a comprehensive list of new feature highlights, broken down by business function, to help you prepare for this release.

(Read Tvarana’s helpful NetSuite Guide)

Accounting:

Balancing transactions by segments: The Balancing Segments enhancement allows users to balance transactions by segments. Users can now identify custom segments to balance for dimensions other than just the company or subsidiary (One World accounts), for example balancing segments for product lines or business units. Running the Balancing by Segments process in NetSuite will automatically balance transactions by their balancing segments.
Advanced Revenue Management enhancements: NetSuite 2020.1 delivers some significant enhancements to Advanced Revenue Management with features such as New Revenue Summary subtab for Revenue Arrangements, Enhanced Revenue Allocation Support for SuiteBilling Change Orders, ‘Return of Element’ Renamed to ‘Linked Element’, and Documentation Enhancements.
SuiteAnalytics enhancements: 2020.1 now features enhancements that allow transaction links to the previous and next transaction in a transaction workflow at the transaction level. There are also enhancements to the Transaction Detail workbook such as a primary accounting book filter when using Multi-Book accounting, and a Transaction Overview and Account Turnover (One World accounts) pivot table.
SuiteApprovals enhancements: SuiteApprovals version 5.00.0 now includes an extension to Requisition Records which allows users to define approval rules for requisitions in either of two ways: By using the total line amount of the record as the basis and then selecting an approval routing type (employee hierarchy or custom approval matrix), OR by specifying an approval chain (employee hierarchy or custom) regardless of the total amount on the record.
Transaction email enhancements: This allows for building of custom email templates by following Documents > Templates > Email Templates. These custom templates can be set as the default for standard transactions with the new Default Email Template feature.

Administration:

Deprecation plan for Full Access role: 2019.1 saw the deprecation of the Full Access role and will be disabled as of 2021.1. This role will be set to inactive in the interim, as of January 2020, and will no longer appear in the list of roles available for users who have this role assigned.
Antivirus Scanning on File Cabinet files: To provide improved security to all NetSuite accounts, an embedded antivirus scanner automatically scans all new and updated files as they are uploaded to the File Cabinet, uploading only safe files. The same process is applied to files being attached to email messages.
Localization context feature: In order to improve record performance, this new feature in the 2020.1 release allows developers to tailor scripts for different countries and preventing these scripts from deploying unnecessarily on records associated with other countries. Use of this feature will be limited to standard records of the types Item, Transaction and Entity.
OAuth 2.0: This feature targeting access to REST Web Services and RESTlets, provides an alternative to token-based authentication; and is easy to implement, as it eliminates the need for request signing. The OAuth 2.0 flow provides two tokens at the end of an application- an access token and a refresh token. The access token is valid for 60 minutes, and once this expires, the refresh token is used to generate a new token without the need to initiate the flow from the beginning. The OAuth 2.0 feature also includes two new permissions: OAuth 2.0 Authorized Applications Management for administrators or roles with core administration permissions, and login using OAuth 2.0 Access Tokens.
Data center specific NetSuite domains for integrations now targeted for deprecation: Targeted for deprecation in the 2020.2 release, integration requests sent to data center-specific domains will no longer be processed in sandbox, special purpose, and Release Preview accounts. It is advisable to transition integrations to use account-specific domains as soon as possible.

Order Management:

Multi-Subsidiary Customer Integration with billing accounts: The Multi-Subsidiary Customer feature is now available for SuiteBilling for users who have billing accounts across subsidiaries, with the ability to add secondary subsidiaries to customers.
Enhancements to standard roles and permissions: All roles have new view/edit permissions for: price book, price plan, subscription change order. The default permission level is View, with optional permissions for Create and Edit. Roles with Full Access permission can view, edit and create.
Enhanced visibility into Automatic Fulfillment Request Creation: A new log in 2020.1 holds information regarding creation of fulfillment requests, and enables users to audit the automation process. Additionally, log data can be used to create a SuiteAnalytics Workbook or a Saved Search. The log is available in Business Events Processing History, under the System Information subtab of a sales order.
Create Automatic Fulfillment Requests on Expected Ship Date: Available on the Setup Management Page, users can automatically create a fulfillment request when an expected ship date is reached. This feature enables the automatic creation of fulfillment requests when the expected ship date is set for the future, helping in optimization of order management workflow, as warehouse employees receive the fulfillment request on the planned fulfillment date.

Banking:

Bank Feeds SuiteApp: This SuiteApp allows administrators to set up bank feeds directly from their financial institution accounts in order to monitor and manage cash flow needs with better accuracy and predictability. The Bank Feeds SuiteApp directly connects to supported financial institutions in the United States and Canada to automatically import bank data and account balances on a daily basis directly into NetSuite, eliminating the need for manual import.
Financial Institution Connectivity API: The new Financial Institution Connectivity API is used to develop a SuiteScript plugin for automating the import of bank statement files to the Statement File Import page. This process had to be done manually in 2019.2. This API enables the development of custom SuiteScript plugins for financial institutions, both inside as well as outside of the United States and Canada.

Employee Management:

Employee Change Requests: The ECR feature has been enhanced with two features to the manager self-service experience namely: Guidelines and Relevant Links which HR administrators can enter on the Employee Change Request Type page to assist managers in initiating ECRs; and Salary and Job Duration Insights which give managers insights on employees’ salaries and job duration based on two years’ worth of data, thus helping in making informed decisions while approving or rejecting change requests.
Advanced Employee Permissions: These can now be customized to restrict the instances that a role has access to the employee record by location and subsidiary. Previously, only the following restrictions were available: Active & Non-Terminated, Subordinates, Own Only, Inherit From Role. Additionally, the Lists > Employees permission will take precedence over any of the employee permissions included with Advanced Employee Permissions feature, as part of a continuing effort to separate the legacy permission model from the Advanced Employee Permissions feature, thereby allowing access to only specific fields and sublists on employee records.
Employee bonuses: With 2020.1, the Compensation Tracking feature will now support employee bonuses, creation of multiple bonus types (annual bonus, sign-on bonus, etc.), and tracking of employee bonus targets and bonus awards. Those who use SuitePeople Payroll will be able to use this to pay employees’ bonuses. With both features used together, bonuses awarded in the Compensation Tracking tab can be included in payroll batches for the appropriate pay periods.
Workbook Template: The Compensation Tracking feature includes a workbook template called Employee Bonus History
and Current Compensation, which provides a summary of employees’ current base compensation and a history of employees’ bonuses, if applicable.

Manufacturing:

Outsourced Manufacturing: The release of this new feature enables outsourced assembly production from vendors, in order to streamline subcontracted manufacturing processes. Outsourced Manufacturing automatically synchronizes NetSuite procurement and production transactions, and enables outsourcing of manufacturing efforts either from a purchase order or from a work order. This feature is compatible with NetSuite Supply Planning and Distribution Network.
Purchase orders: The new Standard Outsourced Purchase Order custom form enables you to create a purchase order for outsourced assemblies that contains specific attributes for outsourced production such as Assemblies, Outsourcing Location, Production Start Date, Production End Date, Bill of Materials and Bill of Materials Revision.
Work orders: Outsourcing-related information can now be entered in the Work Order Outsourcing subtab while creating outsourced items from work orders.
Actual production dates: Actual Production Dates will now be automatically calculated by default for related work order transactions, and is automatically available on upgrade to 2020.1. This new feature allows for tracking of actual production dates, helping businesses make data-driven decisions by correctly assessing production plans, identifying potential problems and optimizing production runs.

Projects:

Advanced Project Budget enhancements: This feature provides a better understanding of how budgets are used within individual projects and across projects. It enables tracking of costs and revenue while defining a fully customizable work breakdown within each budget. In 2020.1 Advanced Project Budget has enhancements such as estimation of costs based on items, generating budget vs actuals reports across multiple projects, estimation of costs based on project resources, and generating budget cost burn chart, to name a few.
Advanced Project Profitability enhancements: The new enhancements in this feature are designed improve usability and performance, giving administrators to either recalculate financial data periodically or on any given date. The enhancements included in 2020.1 for this feature are recalculate financial data, display approved time as actual, and inclusion of forecast and actual charges.

These are just a few highlights selected by our team, and there’s much more in NetSuite 2020.1 than can be covered in this post. A question to ask yourself as we get closer to the date is if your business is truly ready for the upcoming release? The Tvarana team can help with your transition to 2020.1 and any customization requests. Set up a call with one of our consultants to learn more.