Audaxium Blog

Right now the News is filled with bad press about the economy. Last weeks Economist painted a particularly gloomy picture.

It’s all well and good to simply unsubscribe from the news feeds but that won’t make you successful in the long run, just maybe less stressed.

Right now a lot of businesses are waiting cautiously, not spending money, but waiting for signs of a turnaround.  Cruising along. Perhaps your business is one of them.

So how will you know when a turn around is beginning for your business?  Your business is unique, it won’t simply happen for everyone at once.  For some it’s already starting, for others, they may have to reinvent themselves to simply stay afloat.

Will you wait until you’ve had two good sales quarters in a row?  How long does it take to roll up a quarter?  1 Month?  That might just be looking 7 months into the rear view mirror.

Will you wait until you’ve had 2 good months over targets?  Can you be sure that it’s not a lucky blip?

Will you watch the forecast, and when it starts to grow, start investing in your business?  How reliable is your forecast?  What’s driving the uptick?

Will you look at inbound leads? When they start increasing, turn up the heat on the reps.  How will you know where the leads are coming from and what their intent is?

Unfortunately there’s no one answer but I can say one thing for certain.  Those companies that only look far in the past for recovery will do less well than a firm with a balanced view of it’s KPI’s

The questions to ask yourself are:

• “Do I have the systems in place to get me the numbers I need, and trust, fast enough to react in a timely fashion?”
• “What are the 3 pieces of data I need to predict the direction my business is headed?”

If you’ve got the systems, great.  If not, give me a call.  Now’s the time to invest to ensure that your business can really be excellent once everything is moving again.  Don’t wait until you’re too busy to become more productive.

Here are some example Key Performance Indicators that NetSuite Provides out of the box. Perhaps some of these could help if you had them on your dashboard every day. Keep in mind that you can create your own KPI’s as well!

• Authorized Commission
• Authorized Partner Commission
• Bank Balance
• Cases Escalated
• Cases Closed
• Cart Abandonment
• Closed Issues
• COGS
• Credit Card Balance
• Equity
• Estimated Commission
• Estimated Partner Commission
• Fixed Assets
• Forecast Override
• Gross New Leads
• Hosted Page Hits
• Inventory
• Long Term Liabilities
• Net Cash Flow
• New Business (Sales Orders)
• New Customers
• New Customers (Sales Orders)
• New Issues
• New Opportunities
• New Visitors
• Open Issues
• Open Opportunities
• Open Prospects
• Open Quotes
• Operating Cash Flow
• Operating Expenses
• Opportunities Lost
• Orders
• Other Assets
• Other Current Assets
• Other Current Liabilities
• Paid Commission
• Paid Partner Commission
• Payables
• Pipeline (Projected)
• Pipeline (Weighted)
• Pipeline Deals
• Profit
• Quota Reps
• Receivables
• Revenue
• Sales (Cash Basis)
• Sales (Orders)
• Total Open Opportunities
• Total Open Quotes
• Total Orders (Count)
• Total Pipeline (Projected)
• Total Pipeline (Weighted)
• Total Pipeline Deals
• Total Sales (Orders)
• Unique Visitors
• Web Orders
• Web Revenue
• Web Site Hits

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!