Audaxium Blog

Everyone has experienced it.  You have a wonderful experience with an account manager while you’re investigating a solution.  And then, magically, once your purchase order hits their email inbox… silence.  It’s deafening.

It seems to me that many companies look at their sales team, and at the systems they provide that team, in isolation of what is best for the customer.  And this results in the grand old strategy of “islands of automation”, and a big disconnect between sales and the rest of the company, and a big disconnect between sales and the customer.

Many CRM Vendors seem to build their systems like this as well.  Just look at the standard steps in the “sales process.”  Most have something like this:

• Lead – Unqualified
• Lead – Qualified
• Prospect – Investigating
• Prospect – Needs Discovered
• Prospect – Demo
• Prospect – Closing
• Customer – Won

Now I don’t have any real difficulty with these stages of bringing a company into your customer list, but, it doesn’t reflect the fact that the work doesn’t stop when the customer makes their first purchase.

This won’t come as a surprise but the C in CRM stands for customer, and when you implement CRM you really should think about how you manage your customer base first, and then think about how you turn a company who could buy from you (Lead) into a company who has bought from you. (Customer)

So here’s some ways to ensure that doesn’t happen.

First. Make sure everyone in your company has access to all customer related information. There shouldn’t be a case where someone says “I don’t have that information here, that’s another department.”  At least for the vast majority of information.  There will always be secure or sensitive information that only certain people can see.  But don’t force your employees to waste a lot of time walking issues around your office.

Second. Make sure that your company tracks opportunities and not just Lead/Prospect/Customer statuses.  Alternatively you could track quote or estimate statuses instead of opportunities but the effect is the same.  If you’re a services firm you could track jobs or projects as separate from the customer.

Third. Don’t rely on systems integration to connect different parts of your business.  It’s a constant battle to keep that stuff buckled together.

Many vendors will talk about the fact that they are open, and can hook to other systems, or they have a million partners you can pick from.  Sometimes it works. In the last 4 days I’ve talked with 4 people who looked at a one particular CRM system and said something like “I’ve looked at that system but the integrations between the third party apps and it don’t seem very solid.” Again, I’m sure that there are many good integrated apps with that CRM tool but it will require patience to keep everything connected.

The conclusion of all this is that a CRM system must, naturally, be a system that integrates many parts of your business, from Sales, to Marketing, to Finance to Tech Support.  Large companies have had this available to them for year, at a high price.  But now almost every company can afford it.

If you’re thinking of implementing a new business system you’re probably wondering just who is going to do all the work to get it going.  No matter the system, it’s never a trivial task to implement new things.  Given the varied nature of the work here are some things to consider before you get down to business.

Find a Generalist

NetSuite is a little different than the traditional application. If you’re reading this blog you’ll know that it can touch many different parts of your business.  And for this reason you should be looking for a person in your organization who has experience with these different pieces and can bring them together.

Don’t make the mistake of giving the project to a person who is an expert in only one field.  Turning NetSuite over to an IT expert, or Sales, or Marketing, and especially accounting will mean problems down the road.  There’s too many ways that the system can be tweaked to favour one group over the other.

Obviously the person will need to come from some department but should have a decent understanding of  each part of the flowchart that takes a customer from lead to cash to support.  For Example

• Lead Gen
• Marketing, Web and Email
• Sales Process
• Order Processing
• Items (your product lineup)
• Accounting
• Technical Support

Technical Skills

In my opinion your project leader needs to have a basic understanding of how databases work and best practises on how information should be organised.  There’s no need to be a Javascript programmer or database specialist.  Of course these things don’t hurt but those skills will not be used in the capacity of implementation manager.

Team Building

Make sure you get a person to lead your project who can get others involved, and, at the same time, balance the competing needs of different departments.  Sometimes you need kind words and understanding, other times you need a big stick and some mediation skills. Your project lead will also have to manage NetSuite people, an implementation partner if you choose one, and other team mates with specific roles.

Project Management

Implementing NetSuite for most companies isn’t going to take forever like it does with other systems.  But you will have to manage the initial 1-4 month project and the first year of changes with some attention.  You won’t need to over do it on the project management side but it helps to simply be organized and make a plan.

Training

It’s very important that you have someone internally that can teach your employees how to get the most out of NetSuite.  There is online training available from NetSuite that covers the basics, and, your implementation partner, like Audaxium, can provide initial and follow on training, but you’ll want a great communicator in house to maximise your investment.

Passion

It would be nice if your project leader gets kind of excited starting with a clean slate like NetSuite and shaping it to improve your bottom line.  Even when the going gets tough it’s still a fun project.

Conclusion

If you are considering implementing a system make sure you have someone internally who can provide most, if not all, of these attributes.  If you don’t have a person you can certainly bring in a contractor, like us, to help but the only way that that is going to provide long term value is if we can build a product champion within your organization.  We’re always here to help but at the end of the day you own it.

Coming up… a post on what other skills and roles the project team needs to be successful.

Over the past 2 years using and managing a NetSuite implementation I’ve seen it help reduce the impact of crazy events in a number of ways.   Certainly these are true of most “Software as a Service” applications but NetSuite stands out because of it’s ability to handle the vast majority of your critical business functions.

In my previous job, as Director of Operations at a NetSuite customer, one of my worries was what happens if some kind of big event occurs.  Even though I was fairly confident that we’d do ok with each of them I often thought through scenarios and tried to figure out the impact on the business.  

Here are some examples where I think having a SaaS system like NetSuite can really help.

Weather

If you live anywhere where you get a lot of snow on occasion you’ll have experienced the conundrum; “I’ve got a lot to do, should I risk the long drive into the office or just stay home.”  What happens when the weather is particularly bad and most people can’t make it in?  Does your office come to a grinding halt?

With NetSuite in place the standing rule can be, stay at home, work from there.  You don’t put employees at risk on the roads, and, customers and prospects can still get the service they expect.

How often do big weather systems shut down your office and strand employees at home?

Widespread Illness

Now of course everyone should stay home when they’re sick.  And you should rest.  This is normal and every office can handle a few people out.  But what happens when there is a widespread flu outbreak?  

Every business should plan for the situation where leaving the home, and coming to the office is not advisable because there is a more widespread flu outbreak or other such illness that scientists warn us about.  Could your company still operate if everyone has to stay at home?

System Failure

Most midsized and small businesses I know simply don’t have the ability to get decent redundancy in their systems.  

One customer I knew had a storage failure one day. They lost 7 years worth of company data and files.  When they went to restore using backups they found that they were corrupt and couldn’t be loaded.  They went out of business.

Fires happen. Power in your building fails.  Servers fail.  Drive Arrays Fail.  While the probability may be low just what would you do if it did occur?  Could you keep operating, either from a different location or on different hardware?

Recently a marketing team was preparing to do a promotion that needed to go out that day.  Then the power went out in the local area.  Did they get the promo out?  Of course.  Zip home, hop online and hit the “execute campaign” button.

Laptop/Desktop Failure or Change

Have you ever lost a laptop, or had a desktop fail?  Just what is on those systems?  Do sales reps keep customer data in excel files?  Is the Quickbooks database on there?  Do you have customer sensitive data on individual workstations?

Being able to simple switch machines and lose very little is a wonderful experience for both the user and the IT guy.  There’s a lot less yelling while the data is recovered.  Or a lot less crying if the machine has been lost.

Virus

I like this particular category as a separate one.  There’s a different set of probabilities involved.  How often to individual users or your server get brought to their knees by viruses?  

In my experience it happens.  Perhaps one out of ten users for a day a year.  Again, it’s very nice to be able to move a user to a different machine while removing the virus, and not have your company data at risk from them.

Almost every company has an anti-virus solution in place.  But what happens when they do hit?

Remote Access

Maintaining connection to remote offices, in a secure fashion, can often be a pain.  By having all the information hosted, in one place, there’s less to worry about and the remote office is just as productive as your own.  It’s also much easier to get a remote location up and running as you expand.

Conclusion

All these situations come down to the same thing.  Stuff Happens.  Your data can be safe and you can get access to it from anywhere.  Seems simple.

So what are you doing to make sure that this is the case for your company?  Consider: Sales, Marketing, Accounting, Customer Support, your WebStore.

But Wait!

What about my Internet Connection?  What if I lose my Internet?

This is a fairly common question.  One that I have multiple answers for.

First, it’s normally your connection, and it’s relatively painless to put in a redundant connection in the office. It’s way cheaper than redundant servers and disk arrays.

Second, internet outages tend to last for minutes, not hours.  In these cases it’s like electricity.  You can send people home and they still can work.

Third.  For remote, or on the road folks, like sales reps, it’s now fairly affordable to get them cellular wireless cards for their laptops.  Depending on where you live.  Heck, in emergencies you can access Netsuite on your iPhone or similar device.

Implementing a system like NetSuite means introducing change into your company.  There’s no avoiding it.  So how do you prepare during your CRM Evaluation?  Here are some tips.

Explain Why

Often you’ll have one driving reason why you picked up the mouse and found a NetSuite Partner to chat about a new business system.  But often there are a number of other considerations that pushed you over the edge.  As you launch the investigation into a new tool it’s a good idea to write these reasons down and make sure they are effectively communicated with your extended team.  And by team I mean anyone that has anything remotely to do with the application.

The reason you should do this is first, to get everyone involved, and secondly, because your teammates will immediately begin looking for ways to solve the problem.  They’ll tell you what applications meet their needs and what fixes can be made today to make life better.  At least some will.  Those will mainly be your early adopters.

Get Input

Once you get the project rolling a bit I always suggest polling everyone about their ideas, concerns, and requirements around a new system.  Make this fairly free form. Don’t pigeon hole people into clicking answer boxes.  Just ask; “How should a new system improve how we work?”

If some people don’t respond initially make a note.  Then, gently demand their input.  ”You won’t be able to complain afterwards if you don’t give us your thoughts.”  You’ll get 100% response rate after explaining this a couple of times.

Be Broad

Often people will get interested in NetSuite for one part of the application.  As you’re investigating a new business system use the project as an opportunity to improve other systems and/or other parts of your business.  You may get some spin off projects when looking for improvements in your business processes.  And, you’ll probably start to define phase II and III if you choose to go with an integrated system like NetSuite.

Set Expectations

Once you have collected all the requirements of a new system from your team, it’s time to explain to them that they won’t be getting everything they want.  It’s about compromise.  Have another session where people rank or pick out their top 10 must haves from the very broad requirements list. And then remind them that they might not get all those either.

In reality, most people will get most requirements, especially with NetSuite, but lower expectations now will make implementation and change management that much easier.

Talk one-on-one

Now that you understand peoples priorities you’ll need to talk to them. Hopefully face to face.  You’ll have a good idea what on their list is reasonable and what’s not.  Talk to them about what they think of the idea of moving to a new business system and what’s in it for them.

Also start asking people how they want to be involved with the project.  You’ll need lots of different help over the course of the project so collect volunteers early.

Users – 1/3 Early Adopters

A certain amount of your team will desire change just because that’s who they are.  It’s very important to harness this energy and use it to your advantage.  You need to make sure that you give enough attention to their needs so that they don’t get frustrated later on.

While most early adopters will desire change a lot of early adopters have short attention spans.  Their desire isn’t an actual indication of how easy it is for them to learn new tools.  Keep that in mind when planning training.

Users – 1/3 Followers

Followers look to the early adopters to assess where things are going.  This is the most important group to get engaged during the product evaluation and selection stage. They are often the ones who highlight the project risks for you so that you can mitigate them.

Followers often need to be reminded about previous changes that took place in your company and the benefits that emerged.  These stories are very helpful.

The followers are also a good group to start gathering metrics with.  You’ll want to measure the impact of a new tool and one way to get this group engaged is to get them to look at the “current situation” from a data perspective.

Users – 1/3 Cranky

Ah, yes, my favorite bunch, the pessimists.  They’ll think you’re crazy for trying to change out a CRM system, or even put one in for that matter.  It’s important that you focus their rage on what’s wrong now, and then commit to fixing it.  Try to get agreement on what the biggest issues currently are. Then get them to promise you, that if you can fix them, they’ll help you roll it out.

The cranky folks are those that you’ll hold up as examples when you roll out the system.  Often managers will use the early adopters as examples, but everyone in your company knows that they love everything new.  If they see a pessimist saying that NetSuite is working for them then they’ll be more apt to keep pushing to get the system into a highly productive state.

How Ready is Your Company?

Change is about people.  And sometimes processes.  But more often its about the people involved.  If you prep each individual for the system evaluation, selection and subsequent change then you’ll have done 80% of the work at being prepared.  The rest of it is the hard work of making sure the system and project actually work the way you want.

Perhaps you use NetSuite and have gotten into a groove. Perhaps you don’t keep on top of every little option.  Here’s one option that, in my opinion, anyone who is doing email campaigns in NetSuite should use regularly.

Here is the high level.  

First, if you have a large distribution list in NetSuite that you send emails to, you should always test different messages and formats on random group members to see what is the most effective combination.

Secondly, there is no reason to just split your group 50/50.  As long as you have 100-200 members in your second or third test group, depending on the total size,  you’ll have enough data to have statistical significance and therefore make some decisions about what works and what doesn’t.

If you have 1000 contacts in your distribution list, it’s perfectly reasonable to send out a slightly different message/call to action/format to 200 of them.  

If you want to calculate the statistical significance of a sample size check this link here

The other day, I was asked how to do A/B Testing of emails in NetSuite.   It’s fairly easy to do so here’s how. Read More »

My wife, recently, was kind enough to get me a subscription to my favorite magazine, The Economist.  In my opinion it’s got some of the best analysis of world issues, including technology, of any magazine or paper.

Last week I came across an article that mentioned NetSuite.  Check it out here.  The article discusses how, because of Moore’s Law, more and more computing power is available, but, during the recession, companies are going to instead switch to lower cost solutions that offer the same features as existing ones.

Here I think the Economist has it partially right.  There will be some companies that trade down technologies to cut costs.  But, using NetSuite as an example of a tool that does the same for less money is missing the boat.  NetSuite, and other applications like it, can enable a vast number of businesses to do far more for less money.

For the vast numbers of us employed in small businesses, we know that there is still lots of room for improvement in the tools we use today.  Putting in place NetSuite can really be a giant step forward to all those companies out there who are outgrowing Quickbooks or Sage BusinessVision.

This article was prompted by this post by Michael Fauscette, an analyst at IDC who’s blog I read.  Frankly, his post has been bothering me all day.

NetSuite Cases

Michael comments about how Salesforce.com has announced that customers can sign up for a service that will tie in a customer support application to facebook, google, etc.  He seems to validate that “Salesforce.com claims that over 2/3′s of all customer service conversations will take place in the cloud” and then describes how the application works.

Michael begins his article by saying that he hates calling IVR or voice recognition systems and this is what drives him to social networks for support.

To me it seems like the problem that needs to be solved is not, “How do I give support to customers on Facebook” but how do I build a great support system for my customers.  And it is this topic I’d like to address, along with my thinking on why this announcement by Salesforce will mean little to the vast majority of small and medium sized businesses.

What to do

Don’t use voice recognition exclusively - Lets give us all, including Mr Fauscette, a break.  Those systems don’t work well enough yet.  Always give your caller an out to get to a live person in one key press.

Have multiple support points of entry – Different customers want different methods of contacting you.  These will obviously include phone, and email but should also include a web form, perhaps live chat, and social media pages and contact points.

Have enough Resources – It may not be easy to provide the people you need to answer questions in tough times but just remember its about expectation management.  If you make it appear like you can get a person in 5 minutes, and it takes 60, people will be angry.  If they know it will take 4 hours for a call back, at least they’ll know.

Consider managing your inbound support calls in a way that spreads the demand out over time and makes better use of your support teams time.  Collecting cases via email and calling customers back actually can help manage this quite effectively. 

Track all issues – This might sound obvious but many smaller companies don’t have a system like NetSuite or one of it’s competitors to capture all the emails, phone calls, and web form submissions.  If customers know their issue is being tracked then they’ll feel better that someone has got the ball.

Build a Knowledge Base – Don’t waste your teams work by not capturing what they learn.  As time goes by, and the knowledge base grows, your team should be able to respond faster and faster to issues.  This takes some time to manage, keep clean and up to date, and polished, but the ROI is significant.

Measure the full Experience - Many companies measure how long a case takes to close, or the time of the call.  Make sure that you have a way of measuring how long it takes a customer to find you, get through your menus and get to a live person, or to the answer they need.   Monitor this often!

Provide Visibility – When building a support team you have 3 groups who need visibility on cases and their status.  Your own team should be able to see the big picture of open and inbound cases. Your companies management team should be able to see, in real time, what’s happening in support land.  And your customer should be able to see case statuses online, update them, close and reopen them.

How? - There are a lot of systems that can help you do this.  Obviously NetSuite has been able to do these things for quite some time.  

What not to do

Turn off a point of contact – A number of companies, for some reason, end up turning off one point of contact or another.  Sometimes it’s email, sometimes it’s phone.  Doing this is very rarely a solution.  If your system can handle the multiple inbounds, change the system. Don’t railroad customers. It sucks

Dead End a Path – My pet peeve is when I go down a path to get help and it stops. Nothing says “go away” to a client than having your phone system say “Goodbye” or “this email inbox, support@company.com is no longer monitored”.  The other day I called a company and the message came on, “Our call times are longer than normal, please call back again later.  *click”  At least let me leave a message.

Ignore the Web – It is true that your customers are talking about you.  Online.  But if you’re reading a blog you get that.  Monitor the places your customers are talking and get engaged.  I recently got help from a rep of Polar, the heart rate monitor makers, online via twitter, and it made me a superfan instantly.

Getting online and joining or building communities is where we are headed, and where many customers now expect you to be.  Get there.

Why Automating Social Media Support may not work

It’s too broad for effective capture - Support works best when customers have confidence that where they are leaving a question is going to get an authoritative reply. Perhaps if this is on your company facebook page, this might work.  

Noise to Signal Ratio - Customers talk about a lot of things.  If you monitor twitter for NetSuite, you’ll get lots of random comments, or even “netsuite help”.  It’s better to direct customers to a support mechanism that works via these tools then try and filter out the random comments from the customers that need assistance.

Entitlement - As much as we all want support to be “free” it rarely is.  A good support system will ensure that the customer getting help is identified and is entitled to help, or, is encouraged to do what is necessary to get official help.  It’ll be difficult to do this on the cloud.

Size Matters - Obviously if you’re a SME your customer base is similarly sized.  This is true for the vast majority of companies.  Picking them out of the crowd online in an automated way will be difficult.  Build a good system, and they will come, mainly.  This announced integration will only be truly valuable for a few large companies who want to offload a vast number of customers onto the web to chat amongst themselves and help each other.  Not a bad thing, but not for everyone.

Conclusion

In this day and age there’s no excuse for bad customer support.  It’s a choice as to how good your company is at it.  Don’t make people like Mr Fauscette swear at a phone system that’s not recording their voice.

There’s nothing new here.  It happens from time to time.  But surprisingly more often than you might think.  A company signs up for the “Big” system and kills itself trying to implement.

And this… Shane Co’s Reference for SAP

Turns into this…  Shane Co’s bankruptcy

Basically they spent more than 10% of a years revenue on SAP!

They spent more than a million dollars per store!

I’m very surprised that they didn’t shut it off a lot sooner.  I’m more surprised that SAP hasn’t taken the reference off the website.

I have seen this happen before.  Quite often systems like this are really more like toolkits, rather than configurable off the shelf systems.  And there is a lot of heavy lifting to do to get them going.  It gets complicated, and complexity kills implementations. 

It can happen as well with hosted systems but with something like NetSuite there is a level of complexity that is removed by going hosted.  And you can turn on the system in phases to get quick wins early. But most of all, it’s just way cheaper and isn’t going to kill your company in the process.

My 2 cents for the day.

Now, before you go off making an acronym and plastering it all over the place, consider this.  Do customers want to have their “lifecycle” “planned”?

I say no.  After all, you have many types of customers, and while some may want a lot of attention and service.  Many may just wish to purchase, or browse, and be left alone.

The important thing of this exercise is to consider just what different types of customers want, and expect, from your company.

I feel that this type of analysis should drive your selection of a CRM or business system. Not doing the work to figure out what customers actually want will drive you in the wrong direction in marketing, sales, and service delivery.  Essentially you need to map out just what is expected in the relationship between you and your customer, and then figure out how to manage that relationship.

Lets assume for a moment that we’ve taken care of customer segmentation.  We are focused on a particular group with common interests and desires. Now consider the following categories and the questions therein.

Information Gathering

What types of things are people looking for?  Map how this changes over time, before they are a customer, after, and way after etc.

Wait, Stop. It’s not what you want them to know.  Erase the whiteboard and write on it what they actually want.  If you don’t know.  Go figure it out.

Do they want features, use cases, testimonials? What about pricing?  Options available? Comparisons with competitive products. If it’s comparisons you’d better know where those conversations are happening online.

Maybe they are looking for downloads? Updates?  Oh, and if you just decided to put up a FAQ.  Make it good.  99% of the FAQ’s out there are really quite useless.

Knowing what information your consumer needs over time, combined with how they consume that information should direct a lot of your CRM/Businses system strategy.  You simply need to be organized enough to put the right information in their hands at the right time.

Purchase Options

Your CRM strategy should be determined, in part, by what your customer could possibly buy from you.  Depending on complexity, product and pricing management could be key. If you sell 400 different items that are often bundled together in different ways, are fairly pricey, or can be confusing then you may want to ensure that you have a great quoting system in place as opposed to a generic webstore.

A nice question to ask yourself is; “How hard is it to buy from us?”  Pro Tip: It shouldn’t be hard.

Service Options

What kind of service do people expect before and after the sale?  Have you asked them?

What kind of service are people willing to pay for?

Do you need some ability to manage the delivery of those services?

Social Interaction

If you customer is my wife then she doesn’t want to talk to you.  Just send the product.  But if your customer is me then you’ll want to call me up and chat pre and post sale.  Regularly.  But you don’t want to sell to me because I’m cheap.

Do your customers expect meetings and visits?  Calls?  Regular email?

Do they want a dedicated sales rep?  

Do they expect you to have an online presence beyond your website?  Live chat?  Service via Twitter?

The level of engagement your customers want should drive you to a CRM tool that can manage and automate, if required, the appropriate level of interaction.

Problem Resolution

In my personal opinion, handling customer issues is where you build customer advocacy.  If your CRM system handles support in isolation from the rest of the customer information you’ll see a disconnect between sales and tech support.

But, how much support does your customer need?

Is it involved and detailed? Or simple questions?

Does your customer expect you to track issues?

Do they expect to be able to manage their cases and submit new ones online, via email, phone, in store?

Education

Here’s where we ask, what do you want customers to learn?

Just what is that information?

Where is the value in that information for the consumer?

How do they want to consume that information?  Have you asked? Do you have metrics?

Do your systems allow you to segment your customer base to provide the right information at the right time to the right person?

Just how often do customers want to be bombarded?

Should you be pursuing an opt in strategy? (There is only one answer to this question)

Subsequent Offerings

Does previous purchasing history predict future purchases?  Really?

How often to customers actually repeat purchase?  Do you really know?

Should your CRM system be able to give you this information?

Do you actively market to existing and prospective customers differently?

Customer Growth

Does your customer grow with you? 

How long, normally, does this relationship last? 

How far back in the relationship do you need to look to have a meaningful conversation should one be required?

Customer Complexity

Just how do you go about defining the customer?  Is it a company?  A person? Who do you actually sell to?

Your CRM system selection should ensure that you can, with reasonable accuracy, capture the reality of your customer.  Sometimes you don’t need much, and just need a name, email, and credit card, but you might need to track multiple divisions, different currencies, many contacts, and other relationships.

In Conclusion

As you answer these questions and think about your business, you should ask yourself, would it be useful to have a system that can track all this in one place?  The answer may in fact be no.  Seriously.  But in some cases it will be yes, in which case, you’re at the right blog.

Here’s a quick tip if you’ve been using NetSuite for a while and have everything on autopilot.
It used to be that if you were doing a transaction search you couldn’t seem to get the status of individual line items on Sales Orders. The best I ever seemed to do was to search for the status of the order and create a dashboard custom search that showed the number of orders that were:

• Partially Fulfilled
• Pending Approval 
• Pending Billing 
• Pending Billing/Partially Fulfilled 
• Pending Fulfillment 

That search has served me  pretty well and allows you to monitor the different “stages” an order goes through.

But, I think as of version 2008 you can search transactions and display, for individual line items the following:

• Quantity
• Quantity Billed 
• Quantity Commited 
• Quantity Fulfilled/Recieved 
• Quantity Packed 
• Quantity Picked 

When you do your search you’ll want to eliminate certain items from your results with criteria but it’ll be fairly obvious depending on what you’re looking for.

So, if you haven’t looked at these fields to flag you if/when things get missed or become problems check them out.

Once you have your search set up there’s probably more work to do. For my searches I use with this stuff I need to export the list to excel or calc and filter the information.

For Example, I export all line items from open sales orders and include the quantities. Because you can’t do an if, then else, type of forumula in NetSuite I’ll do that in my spreadsheet. Ex. If Quantity Billed is less than Quantity, then “No”, else yes. Then I can filter on unbilled items. I do the same for fulfillments. Then I go and use some pivot tables to see different catagories of items.

Now I can easily see billed/unbilled, fulfilled/unfulfilled items, by class, by department, by location etc.

This is something that could be automated with a little scripting.

It’s a simple tip but I hope it helps at least one person out there.