Every company I talk to wants to maximize the value they get out of NetSuite and once you start putting data in, you begin to realize that there is value in tracking as much as possible within the system.
Over the past while I’ve discovered a number of companies who weren’t using or effectively using NetSuite Jobs, or Projects. (They used to be called Jobs by default, now they’re called Projects but you can call them whatever you want.)
My advice is, if your company needs to manage jobs for customers, or if you need to track internal projects, consider your options in NetSuite. Here’s some tips.
What’s a Job?
A job or project is actually very similar to a customer record. It can appear as a sub-record of a customer and has all the same information attached to it such as contacts, notes, transactions cases etc. It also has some other extra information such as, resources assigned, estimated work, actual work. You can view a basic Gantt Chart based on the tasks assigned as well.
Basic or Advanced?
Advanced Projects is an additional module available from NetSuite. It allows you to do a whole lot more with projects than normally. Check out the advanced project spec sheet here. I would suggest, that if you bill for projects, or use them regularly to track non-billable customer projects that you take a close look.
Automatically Create Items
One of the nice things you can do once you have advanced projects is “automatically” create projects based on the items that show up in Sales Orders. And by automatically I mean push a few buttons.
All you have to do is go to the item, then the project tab, and select Create Project.
Then go ahead and put in the standard tasks that need to get completed to get that project done.
Now, if that item appears on an approved Sales Order, you can go to Transactions, Customers, Create Projects from Sales Orders. You’ll be presented with a screen where you can select the projects and assign a project manager to each one.
Track Your Time
No matter if you bill your customer directly for your time, or the projects are fixed price, I highly suggest that you get everyone into the habit of putting their time against the project when appropriate.
Becoming disciplined about this is a great way to figure out if your projects are in fact profitable.
In NetSuite you can define the tasks, and then establish a baseline for the effort required to complete a project. If you do this consistently, you’ll then be able to compare your baseline to the actual time attached to the project if it’s billable or not. If you’re always underestimating the time you’ll have reports that tell you this.
Tracking Pre-Paid Hours
There’s a useful field on a project. “Remaining Time” equal to the estimated time – the actual time logged. If you sell your customer blocks of time it’s clearly a good way to keep track of what you’ve delivered and what you owe.
Assign Cases
Remember that you can track cases and attach them to projects just like you can with customers. There’s no better way to stay on top of things than to track outstanding issues this way.
What it’s not
NetSuite Projects are a good way to track projects, bill for projects and do some collaboration to a degree. There are some decent reports that get produced once you start keeping them up to date. But the functionality in NS isn’t designed to track the minutia of a project like MS Project would. Not that anyone likes MS Project. If you need to create super detailed project plans that track 100′s of tasks there are other solutions out there for that.
This functionality is also not designed, out of the box, to facilitate collaboration amongst many many employees. Perhaps you can get creative and add some files, custom fields, and custom records for a project but for team wide communications and file sharing there are other tools out there.
If you need more
If you need more advanced project management functionality you can find it within the NetSuite family. Simply check out OpenAir. The main website is here.
If you’re interested in learning more, send us a message and we’ll hook you up with whatever info you need.