Streamlining Financial Reports in NetSuite

Why are Financial reports used?

A company’s financial statements provide financial information that investors, creditors and analysts use to evaluate a company’s financial performance. A good deal of the information presented in a financial report is required by law or by accounting standards.

Who benefits from financial reporting?

All companies including non-profit organizations also use financial reporting to correctly fill out the legal requirements, which enables them to avail the maximum permissible tax savings.

On the other hand, when it comes to private equity organizations, financial reporting is the quintessential document to present the company to the stock exchanges, and making public auctions.

What are the advantages of counting on financial reporting?

Simplify legal audits.Financial reporting allows auditors to review and detect variances and inconsistencies, or otherwise, consistency and transparency in operations.
Promote planning.Financial reporting constitutes a milestone for the creation and monitoring of financial objectives, benchmarking and decision making of any organization.
Strengthens tax collection.Thanks to the organization that the financial reporting provide, we can detect and appreciate the real values of our businesses so to properly calculate taxes.
Provide consistent analysis over the years.Financial reporting allows all stakeholders to analyze the performance and management of an organization.

How does one streamline financial reporting in NetSuite?

This can be done in different steps:

Migrating Financial Data to NetSuite:
- Implementing a cloud-based financial planning and analysis (FP&A) solution so all the latest financial data your team needs is available in the cloud
- Analyzing your data way ahead of the actual migration is a crucial step. You know that your business deals with different kinds of data.
  - Master data – the core data that is essential for the operation of your business processes. It is a consistent set of attributes and identifiers that describes the different entities of your company, e.g. customers, products, suppliers, chart of accounts, etc.
  - Historical data – collected data that is over two years old.
  - Live/current data – all of your recent transactional data.
- Identify subsidiary hierarchies and structure for accurate consolidated reporting.
- Define departments, classes and locations to track and measure areas of the business.
- Create different types of accounts using a hierarchical structure and restrict them to classifications or subsidiaries.
Use the Expertise of Financial Accounting Professionals:
- Ideally, these people should be long-time company employees who are well versed in the company background and its history with legacy systems. Before migrating your data from your legacy system to a new ERP system, you have to do some spring cleaning. Review all your data and decide on its quality. This is the perfect opportunity to rethink or re assess the ways to record new data
- Review accounts receivable process flow, maintain customers, create an invoice, accept customer payments, issue customer refunds and credits.
- Define types of billing schedules, create billing, apply billing schedules to items, apply billing schedules to transactions, post bill transactions, view schedule history.
- Review accounts payable process flow, manage vendors, bill purchase orders, enter, approve and pay bills, issue vendor credits, write, print and void checks.Make deposits, write checks, transfer funds, reconcile monthly bank and credit card statements in NetSuite, define payment processing options.
- Create allocation templates, apply allocation templates to an expense, post expense allocation journals
Accessing Data from a Single Source:
- This a concept used to ensure that everyone in an organization bases business decisions on the same data. An organization must provide relevant personnel with one source that stores the data points they need.
- The benefits of doing this is
  - Eliminate duplicate entries of data
  - Provide decision-makers with the right data at the right time
  - Substantially reduce the time spent on identifying which recorded data is correct
  - Iteratively improve the data intelligence capabilities of the company
- Financial Reports and Standard KPIs
  - Key Performance Indicators can show results over time for your data in NetSuite. We can add up to three KPI Meter portlets to a dashboard. Each meter visually represents data for one KPI that is displayed in the dashboard’s Key Performance.

Period and Year-End Close
- Use NetSuite’s checklist, examine the tasks required to close a period depending on features enabled, reopen a closed period that requires changes, manage multiple fiscal periods, including multiple fiscal calendars; distinguish an automatic close from a manual close, describe year-end processes, prepare for the new year.

Reports:
- Report is a saved set of data results. Reports are more user-friendly and more visually appealing. NetSuite ERP allows customizing most standard reports using Report Builder.
- Ideal Scenarios for a Report:
  - When subtotals are required
  - When formatting is important
  - Simple formulas
  - Information needs to be displayed in a more visually appealing way

Saved Searches:
- A saved search is a long-lasting search definition, that can contain numerous advanced search filters and result display options. Saved Search results can serve as the basis for business analysis and strategic decision making.
- NetSuite Saved Searches can be used in many scenarios to gather any type of information contained in the system. You can highlight specific values, restrict access, utilize complex formulas to get results over records, and many other things.
- One of the most interesting features in Saved Search is their ability to be configured to send email notifications to specific recipients with custom messages as alerts of record changes under the search criteria set, and/or scheduled intervals (e.g. every week).
- Saved searches are an ideal feature to find records data into the system
  - Display a lot of information about a specific subset of records
  - Ad hoc questions
  - Queries to answer a single question
  - List to highlight specific conditions
  - Complex formulas
  - Searches are classified by types, which act like record types in NetSuite.

Dashboards
- A dashboard is a summary of tabbed pages in your NetSuite user interface. This consists of a home page and pages according to your NetSuite role. Dashboard data is dynamically displayed in portlets and provides direct access into raw data, KPIs, trend graphs, chart-based work-books, and reporting.
- Plan the dashboard to support activities and decision-making, add content in a logical and practical layout.

(For more information on NetSuite, read our helpful User Guide)