Audaxium Blog

This post is two tips rolled up into one and it has to do with customizing that NetSuite screen you look at every day.  If you don’t use NetSuite yet perhaps you’ll get an idea as to how easy it is to configure NetSuite to present you with just the information you need.

Recently I’ve discovered that a lot of NetSuite users settle for seeing information using the “default” settings in NetSuite, without looking into the various options.  Here’s two tips that answer the following frequently asked questions.

• Can I get a default dashboard that loads only the basics?
• Can I change the menus on tabs to focus only on what I need?
• Can I get more specific search data all on one dashboard?
• How can I control dashboards but give some free reign?
• How can I present better information to managers and employees?

Custom Tabs

Custom Tabs in NetSuite can help answer most of the questions above. You can add another, or several tabs up along the top of your NetSuite dashboard that contain exactly what you want.  

If you want one that is available as a default, lightweight, fast loading, page that only has a quick search portlet on it, that’s how you do it. If you want a tab that contains all your very important reports for your management meetings on Fridays, that’s how you do it.

Simply go to Setup, Customization, Center Tabs, New

Then give the tab a name and choose which Center to apply it to.

Now go to the Portlets subtab. Pick all the portlets you want to be available.  NOTE, you can simply click the “Show” Checkbox if you want them not to show by default.  For most tabs I suggest that you add most of the portlets to let users customize the tab later.

Head back over to the Categories Subtab. Give names to all the sections you want to appear with links when you hover your mouse over the tab.  First name all the categories, after you save the centertab record you’ll see an edit link beside the category name.  That’s where you choose what links appear in the drop-down. 

There you have it.  It’s pretty simple.  Now you can create more dashboard options and real estate  for your users with ease.

Report Snapshots

If you’re looking to put information on dashboards you’ll find that Report Snapshots are your friend.  Most NetSuite users really love searches and tend to steer clear of the more difficult to use report interface.  However, you are limited in the number of KPI’s and custom searches you can have on a dashboard.  Report Snapshots are your answer as you can have 10 of them on each page.

Of course there are a number of standard report snapshots but their ability to spice up your dashboard should be enough incentive to figure out reports and create some custom ones.

When you create a report, for many types, you’ll have the option of creating a report snapshot just prior to saving your report.  Just hit the save and create snapshot button. And don’t forget to set the permissions on the report properly so the correct audience can see it.

Conclusion

Just with these two very simple reminders you should be able to customize your NetSuite instance to better suit your desires.  If you’d like help doing this ping me an email and we’ll see what we can do.  If you’re a bit confused let me know and I’ll do a video of it.  I plan on doing a few more videos soon.

One final reminder.  Remember that you can change your “Landing Page” under Home, Set Preferences, Appearance.  Just pick the tab you want to open when you first log into NetSuite.

Just in case you missed it, here are links to 4 brand new NetSuite Blogs that have just sprung up!  Check them out and subscribe.  You never know what goodies might come of them.

In the past there haven’t been that many NetSuite blogs out there. It’s nice to see some people stepping up and helping the community outside of the private usergroup.

blog.netsuitetipsguide.com
The latest Tip here is about NetSuite Online forms. But I really liked the tip on the Net Value of Relationships.  Nice.

blog.suiteknowledge.com

Steven has a good tip on using Item Groups to track free items given away by a sales rep.

suiteasia.blogspot.com

Chelsea’s latest tip is one of my old ones, Emailing Transactions.  There are some other good tips here as well.

blog.netsuitereporting.com

Reporting is one of the more important areas of NetSuite.  Here’s hoping for more tips from NetSuiteReportingGuy.

Yesterday I gave you a few tips and things to consider when making custom searches.  Here’s a few more things to consider as you’re taking a deep dive into the wonderful world of NetSuite Custom Searches.

So click the “Use Advanced Search” button and let’s go!

Summary Tab

So you’re an expert with criteria and results.  Great.  Now I want you to go on over to the criteria tab, look down, and check out the summary subtab.  It’s a powerful tool that you should know how to operate.

Basically this tab can be used to filter out results that would normally be included when you use the summaries on the results page.  

For example, maybe you are searching for companies and looking for average sales order size and you want to filter out companies where the average is less than $500.  Or, perhaps you want to show the last time (maximum of date) that a prospect was called but you want to filter out maximum dates that occured this week. I’m sure there are even better examples of creative uses of this feature.  

The tip?  Go mess with it and figure it out.  It can take some experimenting

Highlighting

It’s rare that I see a search with highlighting. It’s very useful and can help focus attention on the results.  Make sure you consider using it regularly, it’s pretty simple. Just set your criteria for the highlight and then what you want to do to the row that meets that criteria.

Keep in mind that your highlighting criteria doesn’t need to be in the results so you can basically add visual information without adding columns.

Here’s some examples.  In a list of Prospects, highlight yellow those with open quotes worth more than $10,000, highlight in red those that have no calls in the past 90 days.  In a list of Customers, flag those that have made their first purchase in the last month.  In your list of calls, bold those where the contact has an open support ticket!  Better to know that before you call no?

Criteria vs Filters

Often a NetSuite user will search for lets say opportunities, with a create date of this week, and show a bunch data about them.  They’ll save the search, and then go make another one for opportunities created last year, with the same columns in the results.

Rather than do this, pop over to the “Available Filters” tab.  Select the create date field, add it as a filter and remember to click the little box that shows the results in the footer of the search.  Add a few filters.  Now you can have a search result that you can dynamically filter to get at just the data you need.  Pure awesome.

“My Team”

If you happen to be creating a search where you just want to see your own stuff, AND, your search is so awesome you think others should use it too, consider filtering by “My Team” rather than your username or “is Me”.  This pops up all over the place, in transaction searches for example where Sales Rep = Mine, or on events where Organizer = Joe

The My Team filter will show everyone who reports to you, or whoever runs the search, using the Supervisor information in the HR tab of your employee record. This is a nice way of making the same search usable by multiple people, and therefore reducing KPI and dashboard clutter.

Allow Subscriptions

NetSuite allows you to email the results of searches based on a few criteria, you already knew this.  Rather than just adding recipients explicitly consider hitting the check box to allow users to subscribe to the email notification, or search results. This is for public searches and ones that send emails when the record being searched is created or updated.

Lead notifications are a great example of this.  It’s pretty intuitive why email out the fact that a lead has been created for you would be a good idea.  If you let users subscribe, it also means they can unsubscribe at will, and resubscribe later.  This self serve option is better than requiring you, the owner of the search, to keep making changes to the recipient list.

If there’s one thing you can spend some serious quality time with in NetSuite, it’s the searches.  It’s rare that I get a search challenge I can’t meet one way or another.  Because they are used to create custom KPI’s in NetSuite it’s a good idea to become familiar with all their in’s and out’s.

Here are some common tips I have for those who have moved beyond the basics of searching in NetSuite.

Selecting the Type

The first thing you do when you create a search in NetSuite is select the type of record you want to search.  It seems obvious and I won’t go through the long list of record types here.  You can search on any record type you want.  But here’s something to consider.  If you are doing a search that includes related records, carefully consider what record you might want as your starting point.  

Example. Are you looking for Opportunities with outstanding estimates attached?  Or are you looking for Opportunities attached to outstanding estimates?  There’s a difference and it will affect your results slightly.  In this case the one to many relationship will give you a different perspective.

The reason for this brings us to the next point…

Related Fields and Records

One thing I see NetSuite users miss regularly is the fact that you can search and filter records based on related records and information.  For example, if you log a call, that call record will typically be attached to the lead or prospect.  You can now search for leads and prospect that have been called by you, on a certain date, with a certain subject.

In the criteria tab, if you scroll to the bottom of the “filter” pulldown you’ll see related records with a “…” beside them.  Click and a box will pop up with fields from that record.  You can do this on both the criteria and results tabs. You can get very creative with this and really dig deep into your data. Experiment with this, make it your friend. 

Go Private

I’ve seen a few instances of NetSuite with hundreds upon hundreds of searches show up for users in both the “Menu” and in the list of public searches.  Most of these searches are wrong, irrelevant, or out of date. Do yourself a favor and don’t click the “public” check box and don’t click the “Show in Menu” check box on your saved search.  You’re just cluttering other users’ interface if you do and making it harder to find what they are looking for.

If you do want to make a search available to someone, just hop over to the audience tab, and select who should see it. Keep the menu reserved for very common and highly used custom searches.  Don’t make your admin clean up your mess for you.

(Remember that making searches public is a role permission, you might not have permission to do so.) 

Transaction Main Line

When searching transactions often people get confused as to what they are looking at, items on a transaction or the Header.  For example the amount on a line, and the amount of the entire transaction are different.  

For this reason you’ll see a “Main Line” field.  In the criteria you can set this to be true or false depending on what you want to see. 

In the results tab this field shows as the  * symbol.  If you are confused, put this field in the results and you’ll see which rows of your results come from transaction headers as opposed to the items they contain.

Result Summaries

One thing you’ll discover fairly quick is that when NetSuite shows search results it will show the same record multiple times for each time it’s found by the search.  For example you search for companies, and show, in the results, company name and call subject.  For each different call the company name will show on a new row.  If you’ve called the company 5 times, there will be 5 results rows.

For this reason you’ll want to use the “Summary Type” column to group things up, count them etc.  Get familiar with them. Once you use a summary you need to summarize each field you want to show in the search.

But here’s the real tip.  When you drill down on the search, the “non-summarized” results will show.  So even if you don’t want a particular field to show up in the actual results, if it’s useful,  let people see it in the drill down by including it in the results, just without being summarized.

More to Come

Tomorrow I’ll post a few more tips that I have in the back of my mind.  And, because a picture says a lot, I’ll probably record a video for this as well sometime soon as well.

If you have other tips and tricks, leave a comment!

There’s few things I like more than to look at data.  Peering into complicated information and pulling out meaningful results is something I really enjoy.

Now if you like complexity, that’s fine, but if you want to make information analysis easy you may want to consider using one or more of, Class, Department, or Location, to segment your business.

Class, Department and Location are 3 ways to divide virtually all the information in NetSuite.  They are built in by default and can do a number of things I’ll outline below. There’s a bunch of automation that can be done with them and just by tweaking them can really make your NetSuite implementation work well.

Overview

Most people find Department and Location the easiest to understand.  Employees, Items, and Transactions can be assigned to a specific department.  It makes department reporting fairly easy.  Location is the same way.  You can track your business by region, office, etc by applying it to transactions.  Class is a bit different.  Think of it as “Class of product” for example, Software, Services, Renewal, Hardware.

Rename Them

Class, Department and Location can all be renamed.  While each really is designed to work as you might imagine they can really be used to segment the data any way you want. How about Product Line, Region and Channel?

Don’t use them!

You don’t absolutely have to use these.  You can turn them on or off as you see fit.  Or use them but don’t make them mandatory, it’s up to you.

By Item or By Transaction

You can use these classifications both on each individual line item on transactions or you can use them on entire transactions.  It just depends on how you operate.  

You’ll be able to decide where each classification method applies.  On lines or on the whole transaction.  The advantage of applying it on the whole transaction is simplicity. Department and location are obvious ones to do this way. (if you call them by that name!)  The advantage of classification by line item is that you get more granularity on the information.  Class is often used here.  

It’s important to note that items, and employees can have their class, department and location pre-set (or not).  This way nobody really has to worry about keying in the information over and over unless you want them to.

Reporting

Obviously all three classifications make it easy to filter, exclude, include and report nine ways to Sunday.  Even if you only have 1 class of item, it may make sense to turn it on so that you have the information in the future if you are planning on doing more later.

Looking at all the segments simultaneously in NetSuite can be a bit of a challenge.  But it’s easy to dump out to a more advanced graphing tool.  I am just waiting for OpenOffice to implement 3 axis bubble charts with a time axis and then I’ll be all set!

Restricting Access

If you’re a slightly larger company it may be nice to restrict access to different classes, departments, or locations.  Not to be a pain, but to give users a simpler experience when using the system.  Because this restriction is done by role you may want to give certain users access to multiple roles so that they can switch over to the less restrictive role the odd time they need to look up something they don’t normally need to see.

Consider Categories

Outside of these classification methods you can also use categories to classify  customers/leads/prospects. This is done by going to Setup, Accounting, Lists, and adding multiple customer categories.  It’s yet another way to slice and dice your data, and in the case of categories, perhaps find out which of your customer segments is most profitable.

Conclusion

Class, Department, and Location as well as categories are a few ways to customize your NetSuite instance and get the most out of the information you collect on a daily basis.  Done right they’ll allow you to monitor and improve your business.  Done wrong, you’ll be frustrated and your users will slash your tires.

If you have questions look me up!

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 »

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.

This post is a repost from NetSuiteguy.com, with minor edits.

As of a couple years ago, a rep, or anyone really, could look at a transaction, and could hit the email button, either on purpose or accidentally, and NS would, without prompting, send an email to the address the transaction was attached to.  Basically we warned people to be careful.  But that’s no longer the case.  (As of when escapes me)

So, if you’re like me you want to:

Email a pdf of the transaction of the attachment
Put an appropriate subject line, email body, and signature in your email
Potentially attach other documents
Use a template
So if you want to set this up go to Setup, Company, Printing Fax and Email Preferences, Email (Tab)

Turn on the button, “Use pop up for main transaction email button”

That will cause the pop up to occur for all users. But your work doesn’t end there. You’ll need to prompt users to make a few more setting adjustments. (Ones which incidentally I believe should be allowed to be done by an admin)

Here’s the procedure I sent to the users.

• Go to, Home, Set Preferences
  • General Tab
  • Add your Signature (Text only)
  • Click, add signature to messages
  • Put in the from email address you want to use
  • Go to the Transactions Tab
  • Turn OFF Print Using HTML
  • Turn OFF Email Using HTML
• Go to the Transaction of your choice
  • Click the email button
• A pop up should appear
  • Confirm the Recipient
  • Add any cc or bcc you like
  • go to the message tab
  • Select a template if you wish
  • Or, type your message
  • Please note you don’t need a signature if you are typing free text.
  • Please note, the field tags don’t seem to work
  • Go to the Attachments Tab if you want to attach the actual Quote, Invoice, etc.
  • Click Include Transaction
• The Default should be fine (if you can follow instructions it’ll be PDF)
   
• Hit Merge and Send when you are ready

So try that and play around with the pop up. There’s a few options there that should allow you to get pretty close to where you want to be.

One important note. I notice that in the email body the fields you can insert into the message don’t seem to work, so test before assuming they are working.

This is a repost from my old NetSuiteGuy.com blog.

DKIM stands for Domain Key Identified Mail.  Check out the wiki here.  Essentially it is a way for you to digitally “sign” your campaign emails and then be authenticated by the recieving email systems.  Doing this will improve the delivery rate, and therefore your response rate, of your email campaigns no matter the volume of email you send.

NetSuite also has a rule that if you send more than 10,000 emails in a month you must have DKIM set up.  We started getting error messages before this cap.  This prevented us from sending emails until it got fixed.  Needless to say, it’s important to turn this on well before you get into trouble.

So, if you are implementing NetSuite, just turn it on in the beginning and be done with it.

Now, if you go read the help files in NetSuite on DKIM you might end up being confused.  Hopefully they’ve been fixed by the time you read this.

First things First

What you need to do is to go to Setup, Company, Printing, Fax & Email Preferences

Now go to the email tab. Look under Domain Keys.

The only thing that you do that is different than the help file is to put in the “Domain Name”.  That’s your domain name probably that you use for your company.  Example “audaxium.com” no www.

If you look up the screen a bit you’ll see “default mail merge domain”  don’t touch that!

Now you’ve read this far.  Don’t click the check box and set up DKIM yet.

When we set it up, maybe it was just us, but when our emails went out they began using a “mail merge domain” that completely messed up all links in our emails.  So… in hindsight, we should of set the mail merge domains first even though supposedly they have nothing to do with DKIM.

The benefit of setting up the mail merge domain is that it replaces the “forms.netsuite.com” or “www.netsuite.com” in the links and uses your domain.  It’s more professional and possibly helps delivery rates.

With me?

So your steps should be:

• Setup your subdomain if you haven’t already at Setup, Website, Domains
• It should be “hosted as” Email Campaign
• Go to Setup, Company, Printing Fax & Email, Email Tab
• Select the subdomain for your “default mail merge domain”
•  example campaign.audaxium.com   
• Create a cname record on your DNS record that redirects “campaign” to shopping.netsuite.com
• Validate that it’s working 
•  open a command prompt and type nslookup campaign.yourdomain.com  
• It should return shopping.netsuite.com as a non-authoritive answer with the proper alias
• Send a Test email campaign, making sure the links all work  
• Take a deep breath 
• Follow the help guide on DKIM using the defaults except for the subdomain 
• Talk to your IT guy and get him to set up the txt record with the “dns entry” 
•   remember the txt name is “selector1._domainkey” 
• After a few hours click the validate button 
• Then, and only then, turn on the DKIM checkbox 

  A couple of tips.  You can’t figure it out using only the first DKIM help file.  Follow the godaddy instructions even if you don’t use godaddy to host your dns record.  It’ll explain how to set up the text record a bit more clearly.

I guess the key message is to validate that the bits are working along the way before turning them on. 

If one person finds this helpful that’s great, please leave me a comment.