New year, new NetSuite updates!
NetSuite releases are not an everyday sight – they surface only twice a year, and we're fortunate that the January release has already arrived with great momentum this year. As expected, Oracle has announced numerous changes to their platform, designed to optimize the user experience and propel companies closer to their goals.
Despite the platform consistently undergoing transformations, particularly in response to rapidly evolving business realities, each year presents new objectives: enhancing cash flow, optimizing efficiency, strategically allocating resources – you name it. Therefore, the most recent set of updates strengthens its current capabilities, supporting you in overcoming challenges and paving the way for success for the year ahead and beyond.
For starters, NetSuite 2024 Release 1 is packing in some advanced AI capabilities to improve your suite experience, along with significant updates in financials, supply chain management, and ecommerce, not to mention new features to alleviate existing challenges users might be facing.
Without further ado, let's go through the notable updates:
Harnessing the Power of AI
Despite the ongoing hype surrounding AI (artificial intelligence), too many businesses continue to grapple with harnessing its potential. In an October survey of over 500 executives, NetSuite found that 85% deemed increasing AI adoption as at least somewhat important in the upcoming year, with over a third emphasizing its significance as "very important" or the "most important thing we'll do." Nevertheless, only 30% of respondents were actively utilizing or testing AI.
AI still has a long way to go in terms of winning over businesses worldwide and dispelling the prevalent skepticism surrounding its rise.
Here are a few ways the latest release assists customers in getting started with their use of AI:
Generative AI Throughout the Suite
As revealed at SuiteWorld, NetSuite Text Enhance allows your employees to create and review contextual, personalized content using relevant NetSuite data. By leveraging just a few initial words to convey intent, NetSuite Text Enhance facilitates the generation of
relevant drafts. Additionally, the tool accelerates the review and optimization of existing content, leading to substantial time and effort savings for employees.
Text Enhance can support you with:
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Producing product descriptions for invoices, websites, and point-of-sale systems.
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Crafting job descriptions and requisitions.
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Drafting employee goals and proposing success metrics.
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Developing customer support communications.
More Intelligence Added to the Invoice Capture Process
As you might remember from SuiteWorld 2023, NetSuite Bill Capture deploys AI-fueled technology to eliminate manual invoice data entry. Invoices can be uploaded via email or drag-and-drop, and the system uses AI-based document object detection and optical character recognition (OCR) to automatically populate bill record fields. This technology also conducts a three-way match between bills, associated purchase orders, and receiving documents to ensure accuracy and create a transparent audit trail.
In the latest update, Bill Capture can now recognize additional fields such as PO number, memo, posting period, discount date, and custom segments on the Review Bill page. These updates not only offer greater flexibility to meet specific company needs but also result in more comprehensive and accurate bills. NetSuite 2024.1 enhancements further improve the Bill Capture user experience, allowing companies to filter by vendor, upload source, and email source on the Scanned Vendor Bills page. Check our Tip of the Week later in this newsletter for more insights on optimizing the use of Bill Capture.
Learn more about how NetSuite is leveraging the power of AI.
Boosting Your Finance Team’s Efficiency
NetSuite's newest release includes fresh features with the goal of boosting the efficiency of finance professionals in executing routine financial tasks such as planning and budgeting, account reconciliation, financial close, and reporting.
NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management
In recent years, NetSuite has introduced a range of solutions to assist their customers in automating processes and strengthening the monitoring of their current and future business performance. These technologies are now integrated into NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), empowering you to make strategic financial decisions informed by data from every facet of your business. NetSuite EPM synergizes the capabilities of both new and existing solutions, including:
Planning Processes
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NetSuite Planning and Budgeting allows businesses to swiftly and easily generate precise forecasts and budgets, simulate what-if scenarios, and produce analytical reports. In NetSuite 2024.1, AI is harnessed for improved forecasting, analytics, and decision support with the introduction of Intelligent Performance Management (IPM). IPM utilizes predictive algorithms powered by machine learning to continuously monitor and analyze plans, forecasts, and variances. The system identifies trends, anomalies, and correlations, empowering finance teams to assess and promptly act on these insights.
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NetSuite Profitability and Cost Management Reporting delivers detailed insights into the most profitable customers, products, and other business segments. It empowers finance leaders with a more comprehensive understanding of profit drivers, enhancing decision-making through the amalgamation of data from the general ledger and other financial sources with operational systems.
Financial Close Processes
- NetSuite Account Reconciliation automates the reconciliation process for AP, AR, bank and credit card transactions, intercompany transactions, prepaid accounts, accruals, fixed assets accounts, and other balance sheet accounts by establishing a direct link to your general ledger. Recent updates incorporate a new task management capability, enhancing the efficiency and precision of NetSuite Account Reconciliation by offering 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 through providing a centralized platform for managing the consolidation and financial close process.
Field Service Management
Managing field services in your business can be challenging, especially when it comes to coordinating and communicating effectively between the office and field workers. NetSuite Field Service Management, announced at SuiteWorld 2023, seeks to tackle these challenges, saving valuable time for employees and expediting job completion.
The field management function is geared towards enhancing communications between the field and office, streamlining scheduling and dispatch processes, automating the management of inventory and customer-owned assets, and providing field technicians with real-time information.
NetSuite 2024 Release 1 has also rolled out 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:
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In SCM Mobile apps, warehouse managers can deactivate quantity or units of measure fields (such as inches or kilograms) to avoid recording errors.
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System administrators can determine if dynamic text in the app, such as shipping rates in Ship Central, updates automatically.
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Data tables displaying pick or ship tasks for warehouse employees can now establish links to images, work orders, or other information stored in NetSuite or another system.
Streamlining Sales and Billing Processes
The latest features introduced in NetSuite 2024 Release 1 are designed to boost workforce productivity and enhance customer experiences. For instance, the new NetSuite Connector for Simphony Point of Sale (POS) introduces increased automation, while improvements to NetSuite SuiteCommerce and CPQ contribute to delivering the smooth online interactions anticipated by both B2B and B2C customers.
The Simphony Connector streamlines the generation of a unified cash sale per location in NetSuite, consolidating all activities from the previous day. This guarantees that businesses like restaurants and hotels always have access to current information, facilitating improved and more detailed reporting.
In the most recent update, the Amazon Seller Central Connector seamlessly integrates purchased shipping labels from Amazon into NetSuite, automatically linking each label to the corresponding order in NetSuite. This functionality enhances the efficiency of warehouse employees, enabling them to process a larger volume of orders more effectively.
The Shopify Connector adds flexibility to cater to sellers using Shopify, offering an alternative to NetSuite for order fulfillment.
NetSuite introduced NetSuite Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) a year ago, providing sales representatives and customers with the capability to swiftly and accurately assemble and price configurable products. NetSuite 2024 Release 1 extends these capabilities, allowing customers and representatives to select subscriptions during the configuration creation process. Powered by the SuiteBilling module, businesses can bundle customizable products and services, thereby increasing cross-sell and upsell opportunities to boost customer spending.
Furthermore, SuiteBilling receives updates to simplify the sales and billing process for physical products and associated subscriptions. The linkage of inventory and subscription items guarantees that fulfilling the physical item in NetSuite automatically activates the subscription and links product details, such as the item serial number, to that service. This enables customers to place a single order for a product and service, receiving a consolidated bill instead of two separate ones.
NetSuite Bill Capture
NetSuite Bill Capture allows for the quick and effortless capture of vendor bills. The AI technology embedded in Bill Capture evolves based on user corrections, refining suggestions and continually streamlining your payables processes.
Create Vendor Bills with Bill Capture in five easy steps:
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Save your vendor bill in one of the approved file formats (PDF, JPEG, PNG).
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Go to Transactions > Payables > Scanned Vendor Bills.
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Upload the bill on the Scanned Vendor Bills page.
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Review the bill to verify the information.
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Once the bill has been verified and adjusted, if necessary, click [Create Bill].
CONTACT GSI TO INTEGRATE THESE NEW NETSUITE UPDATES
GSI is the #1 Ranked NetSuite Solution Provider with a senior-level, 100% US-based implementation team. With our consultants averaging over 10 years of experience in the NetSuite ecosystem, you can trust that we are well-prepared to assist you in adopting the new updates featured in NetSuite’s latest release, seamlessly integrating them into your software. Reach out today for a complimentary consultation with our team and experience firsthand how effortless it is to enhance efficiency for your business in 2024.