Founded in 1998 by Evan Goldberg under the name NetLedger, the primary motivation behind NetSuite’s creation was to provide small and medium-sized businesses with a comprehensive, cloud-based accounting and business management software.
Over the years, NetSuite’s capabilities expanded to include a wide and diverse range of modules across inventory and warehouse management, eCommerce, and CRM.
But it is NetSuite’s commitment to continuous innovation that has seen the platform introduce solutions that meet far more complex operational and financial requirements. Today, NetSuite incorporates features like advanced revenue recognition, global financial consolidation, automated billing processes, and much more. This adaptability, combined with its deep financial roots, makes NetSuite a foundational and market-leading solution for growing businesses.
In this blog, we explore NetSuite’s comprehensive financial management capabilities, with a focus on NetSuite’s financial modules, robust reporting tools, and integration features. We also look at how NetSuite’s financial management cloud services can help its many-sized business customers streamline financial operations, improve accuracy, and enhance decision-making.
Financial management and cloud ERPs
But first, let’s take a moment to look at financial management more generally. Financial management involves creating a business plan and ensuring all departments adhere to it. When effectively managed, CFOs, finance leaders and their teams can access, make sense of, and share accurate financial data that helps shape the company’s long-term vision, guides investment decisions, and offers insights into funding, liquidity, profitability, and cash flow.
Sound fiscal governance covers three key aspects:
Strategising | Determining the financial actions necessary to achieve the company’s short- and long-term goals. Leaders require insights into current performance to plan for various scenarios effectively.
Decision-making | Good financial management allows leaders to execute on their plans. They can relay up-to-date financial reports and data on relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) and make informed and aligned decisions based on the real-time information in front of them.
Controlling | This aspect ensures that each department contributes to the company’s vision while operating within budget and adhering to the overall strategy. This alignment ensures financial discipline and achievement of strategic goals.
Cloud ERP software like NetSuite supports these three key areas by integrating essential financial functions – such as accounting, asset management, revenue recognition, and payment processing. This native connectedness ensures real-time visibility into the company’s financial health and streamlines daily operations, including period-end closing processes.
Core finance and accounting features
Your NetSuite implementation always comes with standard ERP and CRM modules, which are sometimes enough for a business. However, it’s more likely that you will require more functionality. If that’s the case you, it’s easy to customise and build out NetSuite with various modules. Each NetSuite module is designed to address specific business functions, help you manage different aspects of your growing business or, as we will discuss further in this blog, introduce more functionally rich financial solutions.
But first, let’s look at the core NetSuite financial features for day to day back-office processes.
General Ledger |The backbone of NetSuite’s financial management, the General Ledger centralises all accounting data, ensuring accurate and comprehensive financial reporting.
Accounts Receivable (AR) | Manages invoicing, payments, and collections, helping to streamline the revenue cycle and improve cash flow management.
Accounts Payable (AP) | Facilitates efficient handling of vendor bills, payments, and expense reports, ensuring timely payments and accurate financial records.
Fixed Assets Management | Tracks and manages the lifecycle of fixed assets – from acquisition through depreciation to disposal – ensuring compliance and accurate financial reporting.
This core module also allows uses to create and store financial documents including balance sheets, payment receipts, and tax statements. There are also several features to automate tax calculations, manage compliance, file tax returns and report on finances.
NetSuite financial management modules
If you’re looking for more financial functionality, you are spoilt for choice. Here’s a list of NetSuite’s financial management modules:
NetSuite Advanced Financials
NetSuite Advanced Financials enhances NetSuite with budgeting, expense allocations, amortisation, and flexible billing management. It ensures strong financial management by monitoring budgets versus actuals and provides sophisticated expense allocations and amortisation schedules. This module automates billing processes, eliminating manual work, and allows the creation of customised billing schedules and templates, including milestone billing for service contracts.
Key capabilities:
- Supports management of multiple budgets
- Enables monitoring of budget versus actual in real time
- Allocate expenses by GL account, class, department and location
- Link amortisation schedules to bills, bill credits, jobs and more
- Set up flexible billing schedules
- Allows assignment of billing schedules based on sales order line items
- Integrates billing with sales commissions and sales forecasts
TL;DR
Enhances financial management capabilities by adding features for budgeting, expense allocations, amortisation, and statistical accounts, providing a more robust financial framework.
NetSuite SuiteBilling
NetSuite SuiteBilling offers everything from consolidated invoicing, flexible pricing and packaging, and automated rating processes, through to seamless integrations with NetSuite Advanced Revenue Management and Core Financials modules.
By providing transparency around all billing activities with a powerful Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) suite, NetSuite SuiteBilling helps companies streamline billing operations and provides real-time visibility into billing and financial activity.
Key capabilities:
- Pricing models flexibility including flat models, volume models and tiered models
- Rating models allow users to represent invoice charges as either one-time, in-advance or in-arrears in one customer subscription
- Schedule and automate changes to subscriptions with change orders
- Create both common pricing templates and customised scenarios to support customer specific deal negotiations and contracts
- Real-time reporting includes audit and change tracking, monthly recurring revenue, total contract value and customer churn
TL;DR
Adds comprehensive invoice and billing management to support transaction-based, subscription, usage-based, and hybrid billing models. It also ensures accurate revenue accounting in line with the latest revenue recognition standards.
NetSuite Revenue Management
NetSuite Revenue Management eliminates the need for spreadsheets by simplifying complex revenue recognition mandates, whether a sale includes a single obligation, multiple obligations over time, or diverse obligations in a bundle. This module automates revenue policies for compliance, provides real-time revenue intelligence, and offers actionable data.
Key capabilities:
- Automate revenue policy management, including exceptions and schedule updates
- Schedule revenue recognition automatically based on predefined rules
- Identify and record unbilled revenue automatically
- Account for exchange rate fluctuations in multi-currency transactions
- Adjust contract liability and asset balances automatically with real-time data
- Post to the general ledger from revenue plans on a flexible schedule
- Update revenue projections based on real-time business events
TL;DR
Automates revenue forecasting, allocation, recognition, reclassification, and auditing. This helps companies comply with revenue recognition regulations and report results.
NetSuite AP Automation
NetSuite AP Automation makes it fast, easy and more secure way to process invoices and make payments. It eliminates manual data entry, reduces errors, and leverages embedded banking services to pay bills directly through NetSuite.
Key capabilities:
- Invoice capture by dragging and dropping or emailing digital invoices, with AI pre-populating fields
- Matches vendor bills with purchase orders and routes for approval with automated reminders
- Simplifies payments using HSBC services, with options for ACH, check, or virtual credit card
- Automates payment reconciliation with daily matching of charges and monthly statement downloads
- Provides a detailed view of transactions and account balances in the SuiteBanking Center dashboard
TL;DR
Automates the entire invoice-to-pay process, from data capture to making payments and reconciliation to increase efficiency and reduce the costs associated with accounts payable processing.
NetSuite Bill Capture
NetSuite Bill Capture streamlines invoice processing, reduces errors, and enhances productivity by automating the capture and matching of vendor invoices. With NetSuite Bill Capture you can email or drag-and-drop vendor invoices directly into NetSuite. AI/ML-based document object detection and optical character recognition (OCR) then scan and populate bill record fields automatically, improving accuracy by learning from previous invoices.
Key capabilities:
- Invoice scanning with AI/ML-based OCR to automatically extract and populate invoice details
- Automated two- or three-way matching with purchase orders and receiving documents
- Quick and easy approval routing with SuiteApprovals, tailored workflows, and automated reminders
TL;DR
Capture vendor invoices more quickly and with fewer errors by eliminating manual data entry and automating the entire invoice capture process.
NetSuite Planning & Budgeting
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting facilitates comprehensive company-wide and departmental budgeting and planning with advanced modelling capabilities, approval workflows, and detailed reporting.
The module reduces budget cycle times, eliminates calculation errors, and generates integrated financial statements. This means that time once spent on manual data entry and formula maintenance can be allocated to strategic financial analysis.
Key capabilities:
- Simplifies workforce planning, including headcount, salary, and compensation planning
- Supports demand forecasting at various levels
- Enables scenario modelling with multiple dimension
- Aligns revenue forecasts and sales plans with corporate objectives, tracking performance against goals
- Supports flexible driver-based planning, connecting operational assumptions to financial outcomes
- Utilises predictive planning with AI to analyse plans, forecasts, and variances, identifying trends and anomalies
- Ensures data accuracy and accessibility with prebuilt data integration with NetSuite ERP
- Integrates with Microsoft Office tools, allowing users to perform what-if analyses and create data grids in Excel
TL;DR
Provides an easy-to-use budgeting and forecasting solution that uses financial data from NetSuite to facilitate company-wide and departmental planning with modelling capabilities, approval workflows, and reporting.
NetSuite Account Reconciliation
NetSuite Account Reconciliation helps automate reconciliation compliance and transaction matching, managing and viewing the status and details of each account with balance comparisons, preparers, reviewers, and sign-off dates. This results in a faster close, reduced compliance risk, stronger internal controls, and timely, accurate financial statements.
Key capabilities:
- Automates reconciliations with direct integration to NetSuite transactions, allowing easy management of bank accounts, credit card transactions, intercompany transactions, and more
- Provides flexible formats and templates, with prebuilt options or custom formats to meet unique requirements
- Supports audit and compliance with a secure document repository, ensuring reconciliations are not altered or lost, and logs evidence for compliance
- Offers flux analysis to explain balance changes over time, aiding in period comparisons
- Automates transaction matching to support reconciliation processes for intercompany, subledger, credit card, and bank accounts
- A high-volume auto-match engine matches millions of transactions quickly
- Intelligent auto-match suggestions speed up the matching process
- Allows the creation of flexible matching rules for various transaction types, including one-to-one, many-to-one, and many-to-many matches
- Supports complex reconciliations with unlimited data sources and attributes per data source
TL;DR
Provides accounting teams with tools to automate, standardise, and streamline account reconciliation and transaction-matching processes, improving accuracy and efficiency.
NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM)
NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management connects planning, budgeting, forecasting, account reconciliation, financial close, and reporting processes across the entire organisation. Built on Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM, it integrates seamlessly with NetSuite, ensuring always up-to-date information.
Key capabilities:
- Automates planning and budgeting, producing budgets, forecasts, what-if scenarios and reports
- Streamlines account reconciliation, automating complex tasks and posting journals directly to NetSuite
- Manages consolidation and close processes with full currency, intercompany eliminations, and adjustments
- Provides insights into profitability and cost management
- Combines financial statements and data with narrative in a single report,
- Simplifies tax reporting by aligning tax with corporate financial reporting
TL;DR
Integrates planning, budgeting, forecasting, account reconciliation, financial close, and reporting processes across the organisation, enhancing business visibility and decision-making.
NetSuite Multi-Book Accounting
NetSuite Multi-Book Accounting ensures compliance with multiple accounting standards, optimises financial processes, and provides real-time visibility and customisation capabilities for comprehensive financial management.
Key capabilities:
- Automates accounting processes, eliminating data entry replication and manual adjustments
- Records all book-specific activities from a single transaction for the general ledger, revenue recognition, expense amortisation, depreciation, and P&L allocations
- Offers comprehensive reporting with standard reports and customisable saved searches
- Manages foreign currency transactions, calculating exchange rate impacts and complying with regulations
- Provides customisation with SuiteCloud for creating custom forms, records, workflows, and process mapping
TL;DR
Allows finance departments to create business transaction records and automatically post them to multiple books, ensuring compliance with various accounting standards and facilitating accurate financial reporting.
NetSuite OneWorld
NetSuite OneWorld allows companies to standardise business processes across the organisation, ensuring compliance with company policies, local and international accounting standards, and regulatory reporting requirements. It adjusts for currency, language, taxation, and legal compliance differences at the local level, with automated roll-up for consolidated reporting.
Key capabilities:
- Offers robust financial reporting with a multi-language user interface, providing a global view with subsidiary-specific drill-downs
- Simplifies intercompany accounting and consolidation, automating reconciliation and netting, and accelerating the month-end close process
- Supports 190+ currencies and exchange rates, real-time currency conversion, and financial consolidation across international tax structures
- Ensures audit and compliance with global standards and country-specific requirements, offering comprehensive reporting and secure access based on user roles
- Features a configurable tax engine supporting indirect tax rules and reporting for over 100 countries, with real-time tax calculations and electronic filing capabilities
TL;DR
Supports the management of multiple subsidiaries, business units, and legal entities domestically and internationally from a single solution, providing real-time financial and operational visibility and control.
NetSuite Dunning Letters
NetSuite Dunning Letters simplifies the collections process by automatically sending payment reminders at specified intervals based on account balance, invoice amount, or other criteria. This ensures consistent, professional dunning notices in multiple languages and currencies.
Key capabilities:
- Defines dunning levels to set thresholds and time intervals for sending overdue notices, with customised letter templates
- Creates multiple dunning letter templates and schedules, allowing tailored communication for different customer tiers
- Develops automated dunning workflows with varying messaging and intensity, from prepayment reminders to overdue notices
- Allows flexibility to email or print letters automatically or manually, based on customer preferences
- Improves customer relationships by pausing the dunning process for billing inquiries or payment extensions
- Provides a Dunning Dashboard to track the current status of all accounts, including overdue receivables, average time to pay, and paused dunning actions
TL;DR
Sets up automated processes to send reminder letters before payment, helping to collect accounts receivable more efficiently.
NetSuite Fixed Assets Management
NetSuite Fixed Assets Management provides you with the power to eliminate spreadsheets and manual effort from your company’s asset and lease management processes. NetSuite’s solution gives you an easy-to-manage single version of the truth for company-owned and leased assets, a flexible depreciation and amortization schedules, detailed asset reporting and seamless integration with NetSuite’s core accounting functionality
Key capabilities:
- Manages the entire asset lifecycle from acquisition to depreciation, revaluation, and retirement.
- Provides flexible depreciation methods and schedules, including standard and user-defined methods.
- Automates asset tracking, depreciation, revaluation, transfer, and disposal.
- Supports detailed reporting for all asset types, including insurance, lease agreements, and maintenance schedules.
- Simplifies lease management compliance with automated lease payment, amortisation, and reporting.
- Integrates seamlessly with NetSuite Financials for automatic asset creation from purchase orders and posting of depreciations and disposals.
- Offers real-time fixed assets and lease reporting with comprehensive dashboards and preconfigured reports.
TL;DR
Manage company-owned and leased assets with flexible depreciation and amortisation schedules, providing detailed asset reporting.
NetSuite Electronic Bank Payments
NetSuite Electronic Bank Payments streamlines the payment process, enhances security, and supports a wide range of global banking formats, improving efficiency and reducing manual effort.
Key capabilities:
- Generates bank payment files for vendor bills, employee expenses, commissions, and customer refunds, with flexible payment aggregation and notification options
- Supports automatic customer collections (direct debits) to settle outstanding invoices
- Manages payment approval workflows and queues, allowing reordering of payment batches and flexible reversal options
- Instantly creates payment files from tagged transactions, supporting EFT bill and direct debit customer payments
- Provides Positive Pay file generation for check fraud prevention
- Supports more than 50 global and local bank formats, with language support and tax integration via NetSuite SuiteTax
TL;DR
Securely automate electronic funds transfer (EFT) payments and collections, streamlining the payment process and reducing manual effort.
Financial reporting in NetSuite
NetSuite offers comprehensive reporting and analytics capabilities that integrate financial, statistical, and operational data. Users benefit from pre-built reports and the flexibility to create custom reports. Custom reports can combine financial, statistical, and operational data with multidimensional analytics, providing insights at a more granular level than basic reporting techniques allow.
Customisable financial reports
Out-of-the-box financial reports in NetSuite give you a basic foundation of insights about a business. Through the NetSuite report builder, NetSuite users can create and customise financial reports to meet specific needs. By tailoring reports to reflect the unique aspects of a business’s operations, it becomes easier to analyse financial data and make informed decisions.
Excel plugin for financial reporting
For those not wanting to cut ties with spreadsheets, you can get your hands on add-n tools to integrate NetSuite with Microsoft Excel, allowing users to export financial data directly into Excel spreadsheets.
NetSuite Advanced reporting and analytics
Beyond pre-built and custom reports, NetSuite serves as a central data repository offering advanced solutions to help financial leaders slice and dice data, uncover new insights, and bolster decision-making.
NetSuite SuiteAnalytics
Provides built-in business intelligence, real-time analytics, and reporting capabilities, helping businesses make data-driven decisions.
Key capabilities:
- Offers pre-built, role-based dashboards and KPIs for immediate insights.
- Allows customisation of reports and dashboards to fit specific business needs.
- Integrates with Excel for advanced data manipulation and analysis.
- Utilises SuiteAnalytics Workbook for ad-hoc analysis and multidimensional data exploration.
NetSuite Saved Searches
Enables users to create dynamic, real-time queries of their NetSuite data, providing flexibility and precision in reporting.
Key capabilities:
- Allows users to build custom searches with filters and criteria.
- Provides real-time results that can be saved, shared, and reused.
- Supports alerts and scheduled emails for important updates.
- Integrates with dashboards for quick access to search results.
Learn more about NetSuite Saved Searches or download our shortcuts and search tips printable (for Windows or Mac).
NetSuite Analytics Warehouse
NetSuite Analytics Warehouse is a cloud-based solution that integrates business data, ready-to-use analytics, and AI/ML models to deliver actionable insights. Powered by Oracle Analytics Cloud and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, it allows business professionals to load data and perform analyses without IT assistance.
Key capabilities:
- Automatically connects to NetSuite with prepackaged content for immediate insights
- Combines NetSuite data with external sources using built-in ETL capabilities
- Utilises embedded AI for data management and analysis, offering features like pattern recognition and predictive models
- Uses AI-driven automation for validating, centralising, and connecting data sources, reducing costs and manual tasks
- Provides fast, clear understandings of financials and operations with built-in AI capabilities
- Visually explores data to find trends and patterns, enhancing collaboration and efficiency
- Ensures security with Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse features like encryption and multi-factor authentication
- Offers detailed views of company performance with drill-down capabilities from KPIs to transaction-level reports
- Simplifies report and presentation preparation with export options to PDF, PNG, and XLS
- Allows access to NetSuite transactional and custom data for comprehensive insights
How to implement NetSuite financial management
SuiteSuccess Financials First
This is NetSuite’s streamlined implementation methodology designed to ensure rapid and effective deployment of financial management solutions. SuiteSuccess Financials First leverages pre-configured roles, dashboards, and workflows based on industry-leading practices, enabling businesses to quickly realise the benefits of a comprehensive, cloud-based financial management solution with minimal risk.
With the core financials in place and your NetSuite platform delivering value, you then work with your NetSuite implementation partner to build out additional functionalities tailored to your specific business needs. This collaborative process typically includes the following steps:
Customisation and configuration
- Tailor NetSuite’s functionalities to fit your unique business processes.
- Configure additional modules, such as advanced financials, inventory management, or CRM, to integrate seamlessly with your core financials.
Integration
- Integrate NetSuite with other business systems, such as CRM, eCommerce platforms, and third-party applications.
Advanced reporting and analytics
- Set up advanced reporting tools and analytics to provide deeper insights into financial performance.
- Develop custom dashboards and KPIs to monitor critical business metrics in real time.
Process optimisation
- Streamline and automate key business processes, such as billing, order management, and procurement.
- Implement best practices to optimise workflows and improve operational efficiency.
User training and change management
- Conduct comprehensive training sessions for all users to ensure they are comfortable and proficient with the new system.
Ongoing support and optimisation
- Provide continuous support to address any issues and ensure the system remains aligned with evolving business needs.
Considering NetSuite?
Implementing a new ERP system is a major undertaking for any business. But choosing the right NetSuite partner will ensure you are guided through the process by experienced professionals who consistently deliver successful outcomes.
If you’re considering adopting NetSuite, reach out to our expert team and see what a difference a dedicated, experienced implementation partner like Annexa can make.