Overall Satisfaction with NetSuite
We use NetSuite across the whole organization. Marketing uses NetSuite to track leads and campaign responses; Sales uses the CRM to track prospects through the sales process; Support uses case management to track issues and call volumes; and we do all our accounting in NetSuite including billing, AP, and financial reporting.
- NetSuite provides a lot of control. Users can be granted more than one role, with each role clearly defining the permissions to view/create/edit records, transactions, reports, etc. The combinations are seemingly endless.
- NetSuite is easily customizable. You can add fields and record types to your customers/employees/vendors. This makes it very easy to be able to track data that is specific to your company. Reporting is also supremely customizable which makes getting the answers from your data very easy.
- NetSuite has a comprehensive network of partners. Whatever you need to customize or automate, it can be done and there are plenty of partners to help.
- NetSuite is very feature rich. We have been live for almost 1.5 years and we are still learning new things and implementing new features.
- My biggest frustration with NetSuite is the financial reporting comparisons. We need to compare "this fiscal year to period" to "last fiscal year to period". There are date 30+ options for this report, but the results compare "this fiscal year to period" to the entire fiscal year last year. This appears to be a bug. But the comparison still would not be valid until the period has been closed. So it needs to be a custom range so you can compare whatever range of months you want to the same months of the prior year. To do this I have to dump every thing in Excel and copy/paste the day away.
- Customizing the roles is tedious and time consuming. Every transaction type, record type, report, form, etc., has the ability to restrict the permission. Each task in NetSuite might require several different permissions .... and the permissions that are needed are often not obvious. So there is a lot of trial and error and back and forth. Employees can get frustrated when they do not have the permissions they think they need.
- Customizing the invoices and purchase orders is very frustrating and not at all intuitive.
- The learning curve to implement new features is daunting.
- We reduced the time it takes to generate invoices from 5 days to a few hours.
- We increased employee efficiency by combining the Sales CRM database and the Customer Support database and the accounting software so that all customer information is on one customer record. We were also able to cancel the database subscription which is saving the company over $10,000 per year
- For the first time ever we have company wide visibility of lead conversion and case management.
- Intacct,QuickBase,QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions,Zuora Z-Business,Metanga
We switched from QuickBooks and QuickBase to an ERP system. QuickBooks is a good product for a small company but the multiple user environment caused many challenges for us. Plus we need true departmental accounting in addition to the class field for financial reporting. Also, having a separate database for sales and another separate database for customer support was not efficient. We are a SaaS business and needed a recurring billing solution so we looked at a couple of options to just address that specific business need. But the pricing of these solutions was based on revenues and when you are a growing SaaS company that means your cost is also going to rise. For a little more investment we were able to not only address the recurring billing issue but also replace our problematic accounting software as well as our Sales database and our Support database, plus we added marketing which was just a bonus. I used Intacct at my previous job and it felt like QuickBooks on steroids so I chose not to go that route. NetSuite was profoundly more sophisticated.
NetSuite ERP Feature Ratings
Using NetSuite
19 - Accounting, sales, customer support, and marketing.
2 - We have been using NetSuite for almost 2 years so the help we have had to provide our co-workers has changed a lot. In the beginning it was helping people to do their daily jobs. Then it transitioned to helping people get the information out of NetSuite. And now it is about how to customize and automate NetSuite. We still provide basic training to new employees and also to all staff when we create new processes that take advantage of a NetSuite feature which is very simple and straightforward. But it would be ideal to have a full time person dedicated to administering NetSuite.
NetSuite Implementation
- Implemented in-house