Every year, NetSuite releases two major updates — and the first one for 2024 has arrived! NetSuite 2024 Release 1 includes AI capabilities to innovate your current NetSuite processes and key updates across financials, supply chain management, ecommerce and more.
If you’re encountering challenges with increasing cash flow, optimizing resources or other roadblocks inhibiting efficiency, these updates will help you overcome these pain points and improve your workflows.
Let’s dive into the new features and how you can maximize their benefit to your organization.
Unleashing the Benefits of AI
Many organizations are still navigating how to adopt AI and use it to their advantage. After surveying over 500 executives in October 2023, NetSuite found that 85% of respondents said that increasing AI use would be at least somewhat important in the next year. More than a third said it would be “very important” or the “most important thing we’ll do.” However, only 30% of respondents were in the process of adopting AI.
Moral of the story? Adopting AI should be a priority, so don’t ignore its potential to enhance your business processes. Here are some ways the new release kickstarts AI usage for NetSuite users.
Generative AI Throughout the Suite
NetSuite Text Enhance helps your employees create and review contextual and personalized content based on relevant NetSuite data. You can produce relevant drafts with a few starter words that describe intent.
This tool can also review and refine existing content. These capabilities not only save employees time and effort, but can also:
- Create product descriptions for invoices, websites and point-of-sale systems
- Write job descriptions and requisitions
- Draft employee goals and suggest measures for success
- Craft customer support communications
NetSuite Text Enhance
Invoice Capture Process
NetSuite Bill Capture is an AI-assisted technology designed to save you from manually keying in invoices. You can upload invoices into NetSuite via email or drag and drop, and the system uses AI-based document object detection and optical character recognition (OCR) to automatically fill in bill record fields.
The technology also three-way matches bills with associated purchase orders and receiving documents to ensure accuracy and a clear audit trail.
In this latest release, Bill Capture can recognize additional fields, such as PO number, memo, posting period, discount date and custom segments added to the “Review Bill” page. In addition to greater flexibility, these updates generate more comprehensive and accurate bills.
NetSuite 2024.1 enhancements elevate the Bill Capture user experience. You now have the option to filter by vendor, upload source and email source on the “Scanned Vendor Bills” page. Particularly if you have a large number of uploaded bills, these new filters allow for easier searchability with the option to filter by source and vendor either simultaneously or separately.
Predictive Analytics for Improved Planning
57% of executives in NetSuite’s survey wanted improved forecasting, business, analytics and decision support from AI. The new release provides all that by bringing Intelligent Performance Management (IPM) to NetSuite Planning and Budgeting.
IPM uses predictive algorithms powered by machine learning to continuously monitor and analyze plans, forecasts and variances. The system highlights the trends, anomalies, biases and correlations it finds so finance can assess and take faster action on those insights.
- Forecast Variance and Bias
The forecast variance metric helps finance teams assess the reliability of their forecasts by measuring the deviation between historical scenarios and actual outcomes. Forecast bias identifies tendencies to over or under forecast for adjusting future predictions. - Predictions
Identify the likelihood of meeting or missing a target forecast by analyzing variations between forecasted figures and computer-generated predictions, quantifying associated risk and enabling proactive measures for finance teams to address significant deviations in forecasts. - Anomalies
Unearth unusual patterns in data that deviate from expected results by identifying unusual patterns and outlier values in data, providing crucial information for strategic decision-making, such as sudden volatility in actuals or missing data.
Boosting Your Finance Team’s Efficiency
NetSuite 2024.1 also offers new capabilities aimed at helping finance professionals be more efficient in completing routine financial tasks such as planning and budgeting, account reconciliation, financial close and reporting.
NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management
Over the last few years, NetSuite unveiled a series of solutions to help users automate processes and better monitor the current and future performance of their businesses. NetSuite brought these technologies together with NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), which will help you make strategic financial decisions that consider data from every part of your organization.
NetSuite EPM combines the power of both new and existing solutions, including:
Planning Processes
- NetSuite Planning and Budgeting lets businesses quickly and easily produce accurate forecasts and budgets, model what-if scenarios and generate analytical reports.
NetSuite 2024.1 harnesses AI for improved forecasting, analytics and decision support with the addition of Intelligent Performance Management (IPM), which uses predictive algorithms powered by machine learning to continuously monitor and analyze plans, forecasts, and variances. The system highlights the trends, anomalies, and correlations it finds so finance can assess and quickly take action on those insights. - NetSuite Profitability and Cost Management Reporting gives detailed insight into which customers, products and other segments of a business are most profitable. It gives finance leaders a deeper understanding of profit drivers and helps them make better decisions by combining data from the general ledger and other financial sources with operational systems.
Financial Close Processes
- NetSuite Account Reconciliation automates reconciliations for AP, AR, bank and credit card transactions, intercompany transactions, prepaid accounts, accruals and fixed assets accounts, and other balance sheet accounts through a direct link to your general ledger.
- Updates include a new task management capability that increases the efficiency and accuracy of NetSuite Account Reconciliation by providing a centralized platform to customize activities and assign tasks from the close checklist to team members.
NetSuite Close Management and Consolidation helps companies comply with regulatory requirements and internal governance standards by providing a centralized platform for managing the consolidation and financial close process.
NetSuite EPM
Delivering Context and Automation to Reporting
Financial reporting is a process rife with challenges for organizations using disconnected systems and manual tools. NetSuite EPM contains several solutions to ease the complexity. NetSuite Corporate Tax Reporting automates tax reporting processes and enables organizations with multinational operations to efficiently comply with new OECD country by country reporting (CbCR) obligations.
With this new range of workflow, task management and transfer pricing capabilities, finance teams can improve the speed and accuracy of tax reporting.
NetSuite Narrative Reporting helps businesses contextualize financial data by providing narrative writing alongside financial statements and data in a single report, making it easier for stakeholders to understand and interpret the information. It also provides finance teams a central environment to collaborate across the creation and publication process for internal and external reporting.
Field Service Management
If field services are a part of your business, you know how challenging it can be to have effective coordination and communication between the office and field workers.
NetSuite Field Service Management aims to mitigate these challenges to save employees valuable time and help them complete more jobs, faster.
The field management solution will help improve field-to-office communications, simplify scheduling and dispatch, automate management of inventory and customer-owned assets, and deliver real-time information to field technicians.
NetSuite Field Service Management
NetSuite 2024.1 also brings updates across NetSuite Supply Chain Management (SCM) Mobile apps, including Warehouse Management System (WMS), Ship Central, Manufacturing Mobile and Quality Management (QMS). These enhancements include:
- Warehouse managers can disable quantity or units of measure fields (inches or kilograms) in SCM Mobile apps to prevent errors when recording information
- System administrators can control whether dynamic text in the app, such as shipping rates in Ship Central, automatically updates
- Data tables showing pick or ship tasks for warehouse employees can now link to images, work orders or other information stored in NetSuite or another system
Streamlining Sales and Billing Processes
You can make your workforce more productive and facilitate better customer experiences using the features in the new release. For example, a new NetSuite Connector for Simphony Point of Sale (POS) adds automation, while improvements to NetSuite SuiteCommerce and CPQ help provide the smooth online interactions both B2B and B2C customers expect.
The Simphony Connector will construct a single cash sale per location in NetSuite that represents all activity for the previous day. The result is that restaurants, hotels and similar businesses can always access up-to-date information and benefit from better reporting.
Simphony Connector
The Amazon Seller Central Connector syncs shipping labels purchased on Amazon to NetSuite, automatically linking the label to the correct order in NetSuite. This can help warehouse employees process more orders faster.
The Shopify Connector also adds flexibility to support sellers that use Shopify instead of NetSuite to fulfill orders.
NetSuite Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) was announced last year to give sales reps and your customers the ability to quickly and accurately build and price configurable products. NetSuite 2024.1 expands on these capabilities and allows reps and customers to select subscriptions when creating configurations. It’s powered by the SuiteBilling module, which lets businesses roll together customizable products and services that increase cross-sell and upsell opportunities to boost customer spending.
You can also use NetSuite CPQ to track trends among configurable offerings with the module’s new analytics tools. They can view the popularity of different options, such as material, features, components and add-on items, with easy-to-understand metrics and charts. This feature helps purchasing managers predict upcoming demand and order the right items.
SuiteBilling is getting updates to help streamline the selling and billing of physical products and related subscriptions. Once you link inventory and subscription items, fulfilling the physical item in NetSuite will automatically activate the subscription and tie product details, such as the item serial number, to that service. This means customers can place one order for a product and service and receive a single consolidated bill instead of two separate ones.
In this release, sales and marketing can also automatically schedule percentage price increases monthly or annually, such as at renewal. These teams can also create uplift pricing templates, further cutting down on manual work required to manage subscriptions.
For more information on NetSuite 2024 Release 1, you can visit their Sneak Peek page or the release notes.
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