NetSuite - A primer on use in a small, growing, changing business.
June 27, 2016
NetSuite - A primer on use in a small, growing, changing business.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
NetSuite Mid-Market edition
Modules Used
- AdvancedFinancials
- Recurring Billing
- Revenue Recognition
Overall Satisfaction with NetSuite
Netsuite is being used organization wide. We use it to tie our customer and marketing activities through to our financial results. We use all of that data along the way to gain business intelligence about our market and our customers. Using one system means that we can easily cross-train, share best practices and minimize our training costs. We also have kept our costs of system administration down as Netsuite provides us a front to back platform. We have significant utilization of the ERP functionality and we are continuing to grow our CRM side utilization.
- Netsuite does a great job of taking a prospect to a customer and then housing all data that comes from that relationship.
- Automation on the financial side has been critical to scaling our business. With the addition of revenue recognition templates we have been able to better track our revenue of some 3000+ customers at any given time.
- Billing automation has allowed us to invoice out 2.1 million to 1,000+ customers within a week or two. This allows us to keep cashflow coming in at critical times with significantly less manpower than has been needed before.
- The ability to add data points to the customer and also to build a customer using project modules all while keeping the books accurately reflecting that financial relationship.
- Customization requires significant time investment. The learning curve is steep. You either need a dedicated resource to have the skill set to build these customizations for every department and every user or have money to invest in additional customization from NetSuite developers.
- Compared to some other systems NetSuite is very intensive to build business intelligence from. It does not do three dimensions of data very well so you have to export into a BI tool, or even Excel. So you have to build multiple one or two dimensional saved searches and do the combining of them in a more user friendly platform.
- The CRM functionality also falls victim to the complexity to customize. If your sales process is well defined so upon roll out, there is little change then there is no issue. However, if you are a startup or building out and revising your sales processes then you will experience frustration as either you need to spend the time and energy to make adjustments yourself or pay for NetSuite consultants to customize which isn't always in the budget for younger companies.
- We have seen a positive ROI in terms or our financial management, fiscal period close, and our ability to manage a millions of dollars in revenue with a much smaller staff as compared to similar companies.
- We are working to improve our ROI on the CRM side as we continue to customize NetSuite to our evolving sales process. Development has tied up resources so increased utilization and insight into the sales side should allow for increased sales and increased rev per sales after roll out of several changes.
- Overall we have been able to change NetSuite as we have matured in some of our business processes. The resources utilized in the changes have yielded some very positive results. We were able to change some item types and utilized classes to further provide insight and depth into our business intelligence systems. Though we still need to pull out data to do any mutli-dimensional analysis.
Netsuite lacks in customization when compared to a lot of the alternatives. The communication and tasking is weaker when compared to other tools. The advantage for NetSuite is they are a complete platform so the best, total package, alternative is Zoho and Zoho books. They are not as robust as NetSuite which, since finance owns the system, we are going to pick a system that makes our lives easier vs. sales or project management. While Netsuite may not be as strong at CRM and project management as other stand alone products, holistically this tool does provide an adequate ability to do all things within one platform.