NetSuite’s second release of the year has introduced some amazing feature enhancements users can benefit from. As always, your trusted business advisors at Big Bang, who understand how valuable your time is, have narrowed it down to the Top 8 NetSuite 2019.2 Features that are most likely to interest our customers based on our NetSuite expertise. Here’s a brief overview of each feature we think will be interesting to our clients. If you would like to find out more about a particular feature, you can read the official NetSuite Release 2019.2 Notes or reach out to your Big Bang experts! You have a question? We have the answer.
1 – Vendor Prepayment Feature
You’ve probably seen our infographic, or you may have downloaded our one pager on the topic, but we cannot stress enough how excited we are about the Vendor Prepayment feature is.
Indeed, in the past, this feature required SuiteApps or workarounds in order to be able to manage vendor deposits and get accurate reporting on those payments. In the new release, this feature is now fully native and works like a charm!
Usage & Benefits
Paying vendors a deposit is a standard prerequisite for placing orders in APAC, EMEA, and Northern Europe, as most vendors require a certain amount before accepting a PO or beginning the work. Years later, NetSuite allows users to record vendor deposits and apply them against one or several bills while accounting is only done when the final bill is received. What this means is you can now easily determine how many outstanding vendor deposits there are as well as their aging through specific views, as accurately as possible.
Find out more about the Vendor Prepayment Feature here.
2 – Rule-Based Recognition Treatment
Another interesting feature to take into consideration is the Rule-Based Recognition Treatment. Simply put, this feature adds flexibility to Advanced Revenue Management. Through this feature, users can now define recognition attributes for revenue elements based on specified criteria. This is done through 2 types of added records:
- Recognition Treatment, which is defined as a collection of values for recognition attributes (NetSuite 2019.2 Release Notes)
- Recognition Treatment Rule, which is defined as the criteria that determine whether NetSuite applies a recognition treatment
Usage & Benefits
You can now avoid having to edit the revenue arrangement for client specified criteria by enabling the Rule-Based Recognition Treatment feature. NetSuite will automatically apply the correct recognition treatment as part of the rule lookup process once you have specified the recognition treatment rule. You can set the default values in the Revenue Recognition/Amortization subtab of a revenue element.
It’s important to note Rule-based Recognition Treatments can only be applied to specify different values for the following attributes:
- Create Revenue Plans On
- Revenue Recognition Rule
- Rev Rec Forecast Rule
- Allocation Type
- Revenue Allocation Group
3 – Time Modification
Another amazing new feature that will save you time and money, is Time Modification. Like Vendor Prepayment, this is another example of a functionality that needed technical workarounds to be implemented. In the past, it required a full customization in order to work, and it is now available natively in the system.
Usage & Benefits
With this feature, you can now easily manipulate approved, pending approval and un-billed/un-posted time entries. However, This feature has 3 notable additions:
- Bulk Time Modification
- Locked Timesheet Periods
- Actual Time Analysis Workbook
Bulk Time Modification allows you to transfer time between projects and use bulk actions on time entries. You can modify them, and reject approved time. Note, once time is rejected, it cannot be modified. More importantly, you can write-off time, if necessary, all with a few clicks allowing you to reduce non-value added work and deleting transactions or creating back-end journals while maintaining audit trail.
Steps
- Go to Transactions → Employees → Update Time Entries
- Select the Fields you want to change
- Confirm changes
**You cannot modify the time for an employee who is not a resource on the project you want to transfer time to
Locked Timesheet Periods allow you to prevent employees from editing/adding/submitting/saving any actual time bills after a certain predetermined time. High-level managers can define the number of days/weeks/months before time is locked allowing them to be more compliant with the company’s processes and have a better control over timesheet submission. Setting a grace period is also a possibility to allow employees to get a few more days before completely losing editing rights to their timesheet. As an admin, you can unlock periods as well for a specific project, or even for a specific employee.
Actual Time Analysis allows you to report on actual time and get better visibility on the hours spent on each project. You can compare billable and non-billable time for example. Choose from a list of fields and modify the layout to get the best results based on your requirements.
4 – Country Specific Reports
This one is more relevant for our global customers – we have not forgotten about you! It allows users to have more accurate results in their financials based on their localization. Create specific reports for all the countries you manage by defining a framework and assembling accounts. These reports are done through building blocks.
Usage & Benefits
These reports are dependent on the localization feature and serve as a framework for defining and assembling account balance based reports. Country-specific reports is a prerequisite for other localization reports. You can benefit greatly from this feature as it will allow you to customize your financial report based on the country using HTML templates for the layout, having multiple accounts of different types grouped in one, specify accounts by number or prefix range, have dynamic positioning and support localization SuiteApps. When creating a new report, two items are required: Name and Template. After editing your report, you can change it based on different contexts and export it, if needed.
Note that, unlike the SuiteApp reports, this particular type of report can be locked and copied. You can make a copy of the report and make changes even if it is locked (an action you would not normally be able to do).
This feature is Interesting for customers around the world and can be very powerful if used properly.
5 – Advanced Banking Data Import
Another great feature for global customers that has been enhanced is the Advanced Banking Data Import. This free functionality can easily be installed through Additional SuiteApps, namely: Bank Statement Parsers SuiteApp and Bank Connectivity SuiteApp.
Usage & Benefits
There has always been various ways of handling bank reconciliation with NetSuite, in the past.
However, this new enhancement now supports additional banking file formats to be imported in the system, and even allows creating fully customized formats. This feature comes with new records representing your Financial Institutions from which you may have multiple accounts, which may require different banking file formats depending on their nature.
See image below for a graphical representation.
User experience has also been optimized by updating the user interface, and enhancing the import process by providing status updates and error handling information for failed imports. Bank reconciliation is now easier, more intuitive and takes less time.
6 – Entity Merge Across Subsidiaries
The entity merge across subsidiaries is an enhancement brought to simplify intercompany entities management for OneWorld accounts. By leveraging the multi-subsidiary customer feature, instead of having several records representing each subsidiary for the same customer, you can now merge them together and have only one customer/vendor record representing all the different entities.
Usage & Benefits
It’s important to read the merge rules before going through any kind of entity merge. This feature facilitates the ability to look for duplicates across subsidiaries, as you can mass update using the entity duplicate resolution function, you can merge multi-sub individual entries and/or entities with other relationships manually. You can conduct a mass merge multi-sub entities and merge Represent Subsidiary entities. There are lots of benefits you can take advantage of by enabling this feature, however, because it is irreversible, it is very important to note the best practices.
Suggested Best Practices by Big Bang Experts
- Do both a dry run and testing in Sandbox, especially with long transaction histories
- If you are merging smaller entities into larger entities, consider the number of linked records
- Changing the primary subsidiary is not possible
- Consider partner or OS involvement, especially for Represents Subsidiary entities and customers with login access
- Focus on testing historical reports
- Merge outside of peak hours as entities cannot be used during the merge process
- Plan accordingly, changing duplicate detection criteria now takes more time
- The merge can be used for data anonymization
- BE CAREFUL: You cannot un-merge entities after the process is finished
7 – Subsidiary Settings Manager
Subsidiary Settings Manager is also a feature that has been enhanced in the OneWorld context. You have more flexibility when it comes to managing your subsidiaries, your features and overall settings. You can now not only add features to one subsidiary but also, add several subsidiaries to a feature.
Usage & Benefits
There are 3 use cases scenarios:
- Setup one feature across multiple subsidiaries (adding a new feature)
- Setup one subsidiary across multiple features (adding a new subsidiary)
- Setup multiple features across multiple subsidiaries (system implementation)
Whatever the case, it is not easier than ever to manage subsidiary settings and play around with the different features all in one place. This will allow you to be a lot more efficient when dealing with intercompany entities and saving time on bulk changes when it comes to subsidiaries as you are able to filter in the summary by feature, settings, or other criteria, making the user experience a lot more enjoyable.
8 – GL Matching SuiteApp
This new feature is especially interesting for France customers as it is compliant with the French accounting requirement called “Lettrage” (account check). NetSuite defines it as “matching of a group of transaction lines selected by a user on posting account, e.g. Accounts Payables or Accounts Receivable”. It basically allows NetSuite users to link transactions together by generating a unique identifier when matching transactions.
Usage & Benefits
GL Matching is a tool for GL reconciliation that is especially useful in France as it simplifies compliance with the cultural expectation of Lettrage which roughly translates into matching details or checking accounts.
The NetSuite 2019.2 Release is full of great feature enhancements users can benefit from and we are happy to share the ones we think are most relevant with our NetSuite audience. If you love a feature and would like to set it up, we are also happy to walk you through it! Otherwise, don’t hesitate to read the official NetSuite 2019.2 Release Notes.