Easy-to-use product with a great UI. Support is very poor.
October 24, 2012

Easy-to-use product with a great UI. Support is very poor.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review

Modules Used

  • Accounting/GL

Overall Satisfaction

  • It is customizable
  • You can set-up orders to bill and set-up the schedule and it will reliably bill like you tell it to bill
  • You can make changes to bill schedules easily
  • It is easy to use
  • It lets you customize the things that should be customizable
  • Support is not very good.
  • Some reports are hard to pull together, especially when trying to customize as they have a million fields. It's hard to narrow down to what you are trying to get out of it.
  • Moving from Quickbooks/Excel and being able to set-up billing schedules and bulk invoice has saved so much time
  • We are able to run reports with everything in it which saves time.
  • We are able to recognize revenue in bulk which saves time.
While it’s not my decision, if I was voting, I would vote yes that we should renew. It’s easy to use. Being SAAS is helpful when not in the office.
We have since evaluated Intacct. We found that it has less flexibility to make schedule changes to existing orders.

Product Usage

15 - Accounting, financial analysts have access to it, and IT has access.
0.5 - Our VP of Finance is the primary administrator i.e. has the primary access controls. To create new accounts, on the chart of accounts, they have to approve.

Once you’ve set-up the system, you don’t need to change much – just add new departments, new items, if you want something split out differently. We can make those changes ourselves without IT.

As part of Sarbox compliance, we need to go to IT to get new/change users. IT also helps out with complex stuff like adding usage data, help with reporting. Our business analyst in IT spends less than 25% of his time on the solution.
  • Accounts payable/ receivable – GL in general
  • Billings and sales order management

Evaluation and Selection

Quickbooks and Excel.

Implementation

NetSuite’s own implementation team did not have a lot of understanding about how we did things, like the way we recognize revenue etc. It was more cost efficient to have our contractor do it. Their services in general cost a lot of money. We ran concurrently with QuickBooks and NetSuite for three months and compared numbers to make sure reconciling, then made the cut-off.

Depending on where you are/ what system you’re using you should make sure your chart of accounts is good. Make sure you make the right decisions in setting it up and make sure that the revenue lines that you have decided on are going to the right accounts. Also, try and not make the system too customized.

  • Vendor implemented
  • Implemented in-house
After struggling to work with NetSuite’s own implementation team, we hired a contractor and he entered everything for us.

Training

  • In-person training
I had in person training for a day when first got the software. The training was good. The challenge was that there was a large gap between training and when we went live so we forgot quite a lot.

Support

Their staff is not that knowledgable and it takes a lot of effort on our part to escalate. We have gold support which we access via support a support line. I am not sure what all it includes. I find that our account manager is more like a sales person, though he is our escalation point of contact. Earlier on, they scheduled upgrades at end of quarter. Even last year we had a problem where they did an upgrade at a critical time.
Yes - Gold support.

Usability

Depending on what your assigned role is in Netsuite, you have different access to the system. While every staff member has different access, views are still consistent - everything is under the heading it should be and I can still figure out things even if accessing through someone else’s view.

Everything is linked together so you can move back and forth easily.

You can customize your views, based upon what I need to see or find important to me.

Reliability

Generally very reliable. Had a few times it has gone out. EOQ upgrades have been an issue

Integration

  • Salesforce.com
  • BigMachines
We are trying really hard to integrate with Salesforce and Big Machines but have no integration currently. Our internal business analyst is working on this.

NetSuite is a closed system and they don’t want you integrating with other systems.

Our first step is to get usage data (we charge clients a variable fee based upon usage) into NetSuite. We still have to maintain this data in a huge spreadsheet. Our business analyst is helping us build calculations in Salesforce that will flow into NetSuite to calculate invoices. Eventually we hope to get closed contracts/orders into NetSuite automatically from Salesforce to avoid double entry.