RSMUS.comTwice a year NetSuite buries us in hundreds of pages of release notes detailing the new features soon to grace your favorite ERP. Sifting through it all to find the components that can add value to your business is the great challenge (some would say joy) for any administrator. I’ve highlighted three that caught my eye but I would love to hear about your top three in the comments.
#1: Supply Allocation
At SuiteWorld this year Oracle CEO Mark Hurd shared his excitement for this new feature. If it made such an impression on Mark it’s good enough for my list. The feature allows you to create much more involved rules for how you allocate limited inventory supply taking the required ship date and order priority into account.
Once the setup is complete NetSuite will allocate inventory on the fly based on your rules or via a batch allocation process. This feature will connect product demand (sales orders) with future supply (purchase order, transfer order, work order) in cases where available inventory is 0 for your location. It will tell you if an order will go out after the required ship date and how late it will be. Changing variables like a expected receipt date for a PO or adding a transfer order will impact allocations and update those expected ship dates.
#2 Personal Information Removal – GDPR/CCPA
If you have UK based customers GDPR applies to you. Depending on your size CCPA, California’s new privacy law, may apply to you as well. Both include language that require you to remove personal information (PI) from your systems upon request. Before this release you didn’t have a good way to do that in NetSuite. The new feature:
- Supports removing PI data from record field values, system notes, and workflow history.
- Permits a privileged user to remove PI data through the UI or SuiteScript.
- Does not remove the logs. Instead, it replaces the audit trail history value with a user-defined value.
Personal information can include names, phone numbers, addresses, health or economic data, or any
personal data that could potentially identify the individual directly or indirectly.
#3 Bank Reconciliation Improvements
Bank reconciliation impacts pretty much every NetSuite account so while this feature may not be flashy, every accounting team will want to be aware of it. 2019.2 gives you the ability to import more file formats for greater flexibility (CSV, OFX, QFX, BAI2, or CAMT.053) and you can now create a profile for each bank to store custom mappings and configuration, streamlining the import process.
If you’re looking for a solution that takes automates the whole file management process you can now coordinate direct bank connectivity to pull the file directly from your bank’s sFTP site. This requires the up-front effort of creating a plug-in to facilitate communication between NetSuite and the bank but saves time every month thereafter.
If the three features above aren’t enough, there is a lot more to look forward to in this release including:
- Improvements to NetSuite’s Andoid and IOS apps
- Expanded SuiteAnalytics Workbook functionality
- Continued progress toward making SuitePeople a legit HCM tool
- Increased supply chain control tower visibility
- The ability to add a custom email template to a transaction form
Josh Ferguson
Josh first implemented and administered NetSuite in 2007. He has been with RSM since 2012 and is currently a Director in our NetSuite consulting practice.