Preface
NetSuite was created in 1998 in Northern California from a desire to bring small-sized and medium-sized business transactions into the internet age. A few people who worked for Oracle at the time wanted to create a CRM and ERP product you could run in your web browser without ever having to install anything in your offices. They received seed money for this new company from Larry Ellison and Oracle and embarked upon their 20+ year journey to making the set of products we all can use today. I began working for NetSuite in 2012 as a technical consultant, delivering customizations and integrations for clients who were just about to go live on the platform. I've been working at that ever since, and one thing I've learned is that every business is unique and brings its own challenges when it comes to implementing NetSuite. At the same time, however, there are a lot of things that stay the same, at a conceptual level, in terms of introducing any business to the NetSuite line of products.
With this book, I hope to share what I've learned about helping clients use NetSuite. I'd like to think I can help make the process of getting a company up and running on NetSuite less painful and faster than it might otherwise be. I hope you find this useful and will engage with me and the rest of the NetSuite user community in online discussions regarding this topic.
Who this book is for
This book has two intended audiences. One is people who work for a company that helps other businesses implement NetSuite. We generally refer to those as NetSuite partners or vendors, or sometimes system integrators. They have lots of people on staff whose job it is to work with NetSuite client companies and help them get started on the platform. As these partners hire new people, those folks need to learn more about NetSuite and how to work with clients.
The other audience for this book is anyone working at a NetSuite client company who needs to help their users do more with the product – or maybe they're considering whether they could self-implement without the help of a partner. This will always be a large, challenging task, but you might feel more confident about taking this on after reading this book.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Introduction to the NetSuite Ecosystem, Platform, and Related Features, is where we start, with an explanation of what NetSuite is all about and what you can do with it.
Chapter 2, Selecting and Applying an Implementation Methodology, covers implementation project methods and how to select the right one for every client.
Chapter 3, Creating a Project Plan, discusses what a NetSuite implementation project consists of and how you can schedule your time.
Chapter 4, Documenting the Organization's Requirements, covers all of the challenges of gathering requirements and techniques you can use to streamline the process, which is the most important step at an early phase in every implementation.
Chapter 5, Analyzing the Organization's Users and Roles, explains how people make the system work, and so we need to understand who they are and what they will do in the system.
Chapter 6, Understanding the Organization's Accounting and Finance, delves into the accounting and finance functions in a NetSuite account to help you learn how to work with these users to understand their needs.
Chapter 7, Getting to Know the Organization's Customers, Other Entities, and Items, talks about gathering requirements relating to the business entities and items and how important they are to the rest of the implementation process.
Chapter 8, Identifying the Organization's Main Transactions, covers the transactions which are a day-to-day operational need for most businesses. You'll learn how to talk to clients about the transactions they will use the most.
Chapter 9, Custom Forms, Records, and Fields, moves on from requirements gathering to the first steps we usually take when configuring an account to work as the client needs it to.
Chapter 10, Centers and Dashboards, covers how, given that organizing the data and activities in an account for users is an important task for the implementation team, you can set up the home screen and other areas for maximum efficiency.
Chapter 11, Items and Related Lists, details how to help a client get items and related lists set up correctly the first time, whether you're tracking inventory items or services.
Chapter 12, Customers, Vendors, Contacts, and Other Entities, covers how the entity lists in NetSuite allow us to keep track of all the other companies we do business with. Getting them set up well requires a solid understanding of your client's requirements plus the native NetSuite features.
Chapter 13, Financial Transactions and Period Closes, covers how to configure and train your users on financial transactions – journal entries and suchlike.
Chapter 14, Procure-to-Pay Transactions, covers purchasing transactions and everything you need to know about all of the options available in NetSuite.
Chapter 15, Order-to-Cash Transactions, covers all the native transactions in the order to cash business process.
Chapter 16, Other Transactions and Custom Transactions, addresses a couple of special use cases, not having the room to cover all of the many transactions that NetSuite supports, to explain how we handle unusual conditions when we need to.
Chapter 17, Analytics, Reports, and Data Exports, goes into all of the amazing options we have for reporting on our data within the product.
Chapter 18, Managing Gaps and Creating Custom Automations, covers NetSuite's SuiteCloud platform, and all of the amazing customizations and automation we can create with it to fine-tune the suite to work for each client.
Chapter 19, Managing Integrations, explains the basics of integrations, which allow us to bring outside data into the system, or export our NetSuite data elsewhere, although a lot of experience is required to know how to handle this well.
Chapter 20, Managing Data Migrations, explains how to plan for a migration, test it to ensure your success, and pull it off as part of the client's go-live process.
To get the most out of this book
You should have access to a NetSuite account in order to follow along with each chapter. Access to the NetSuite Help system and SuiteAnswers, or the public documentation available at https://docs.oracle.com, will help a lot as well.
Every NetSuite account has different features enabled within it, so your account may not always give you access to all of the features shown in this book. When you can't use a feature in your account, I hope the book explains its use sufficiently clearly.
After you've read this book, please visit the companion website at https://implementingnetsuite.com to follow the conversation or reach out to me.
Download the color images
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here:
https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781801818773_ColorImages.pdf
Conventions used
The text conventions used throughout this book are as follows:
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: "The following is a screenshot from NetSuite and is an example of a Requirements tracking record from the free, NetSuite-provided ONE Implementation Bundle:"
Tips or important notes
Appear like this.
Get in touch
Feedback from our readers is always welcome.
General feedback: If you have questions about any aspect of this book, email us at [email protected] and mention the book title in the subject of your message.
Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit www.packtpub.com/support/errata and fill in the form.
Piracy: If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the internet, we would be grateful if you would provide us with the location address or website name. Please contact us at [email protected] with a link to the material.
If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit authors.packtpub.com.
Share Your Thoughts
Once you've read NetSuite for Consultants, we'd love to hear your thoughts! Please click here to go straight to the Amazon review page for this book and share your feedback.
Your review is important to us and the tech community and will help us make sure we're delivering excellent quality content.