Chapter 2

Tailoring NetSuite to Your Company

In This Chapter

Using the Setup Manager

Enabling features

Renaming records and transactions

Programming on top of NetSuite

One of NetSuite’s key selling points is its adaptability. You can give it your own look and feel by adding logos, selecting fonts, and specifying terminology. You can adapt it to your business processes by selecting options, designing workflows, customizing forms, and even adding your own programming.

Even though NetSuite is a software-as-a-service offering in which customers share the same data center and code, it’s not one-size-fits-all. Rather, it’s one comprehensive package adaptable to all.

NetSuite offers several levels of customization, and they’re listed here from easiest to most advanced:

Configuring options with NetSuite’s point-and-click and drag-and-drop tools. This may involve moving fields around, creating new fields, and tailoring your forms and records to your business processes.

Creating new forms, records, and business flows from scratch. One example of a custom record may be a vacation approval form. Other examples include travel records or warranties.

Adding your own scripting, which can range from basic programming to advanced programming.

Later chapters explore customization in greater depth, including dashboard personalization for the individual user (Chapter 4), customization using options (Bonus Chapter 4), and scripting (Bonus Chapter 5). Bonus chapters are available at www.dummies.com/go/netsuitefd.

Starting with the Basics

NetSuite works right out of the box, but you should make some basic tweaks to tailor it to your organization. At a minimum, do this basic customization:

Enter your company’s name, address, and phone number.

Activate the features you need.

Turn off the features you don’t need (to avoid cluttering your interfaces). You run a manufacturing plant in Peoria: Do you really want to present your employees with options for sales orders in Chinese and currency in Euros?

Before plunging into customization, you should know the basic terminology provided in Chapter 1.

Customizing from the Get Go: Setting Up NetSuite

It helps to have an idea of all the possibilities before customizing. What features will your company actually use? Which ones are unnecessary? For example, if your business doesn’t ship any products or manage a warehouse, you may disable the features related to shipping and fulfillment. You don’t want employees trying to manage inventory in a warehouse that doesn’t exist.

The Setup Manager is an area of NetSuite that allows administrators to handle numerous setup tasks. You get to the Setup Manager by clicking the Setup tab. The Setup Manager allows you to:

Enable features

Enter company information

Set company preferences

Rename records and transactions

Set accounting preferences

Set up subsidiaries (OneWorld users only)

Set up departments, classes, and locations

Set up payroll preferences (if using NetSuite for payroll)

Set up employees and assign roles to give them access to NetSuite

Import existing data into NetSuite

From the Setup Manager’s welcome page (see Figure 2-1), you can click the image for the area you want to set up. You’ll see an overview of how to activate features in that area and where to find specific information for each feature.

Figure 2-1: The Setup Manager welcome page is ready for your customization.

The following sections explain some of the most important customization features you encounter when setting up NetSuite. You can reach all of these features using the Setup Manager.

Company Information

This page acts as your account profile, and filling it in should be one of the first tasks you complete. Enter your company name, phone number, address, tax ID numbers, time zone, currency, and other important information.

The information you enter on the Company Information page is used throughout your account for forms for tax purposes and basic financial preferences.

Another simple but very important customization step is to upload your company logo into NetSuite so your logo appears on forms and communications:

1. From the Setup tab menu choose Setup⇒Company⇒Company Information.

2. To the right of the Company Logo (Pages) field, click the New button (+).

The File window appears.

3. Click the Browse button and select a file to upload.

4. Click the Save button to upload the file to NetSuite.

The Company Information window appears.

5. Click Save to update the logo.

Enable Features

This section allows you to select important preferences that apply across your company. You see eight tabs:

Company

Accounting

Transactions

Items & Inventory

Employees

CRM

Web Presence

SuiteFlex

These options touch virtually every facet of NetSuite and are discussed in greater detail elsewhere in this book. Since NetSuite is so customizable, the steps for enabling the features you will need are discussed in context in relevant chapters.

Rename Records and Transactions

Do you speak your own lingo? These fields allow you to choose names for basic elements of your business. Setting this preference renames these entities on all your records and allows you to customize NetSuite with your own terminology.

Do you use the term vendor or supplier? Do you want to call your customers clients, guests, or parrotheads (because you sell Jimmy Buffet fan items)? Similarly, you can decide whether you want to use the term projects or rename it jobs, assignments, or missions. The same goes for department, class, lead prospect, partner, case, event, task, and even phone call.

To rename records or transactions:

1. From the Setup tab menu choose Setup⇒Company⇒Rename Records/Transactions.

The Rename Records/Transactions window appears, where you can change the default names for customers, phone calls, vendors, and more.

2. Make any terminology changes you want.

3. Click the Save button.

What if you make a mistake? Just come back to the Rename Records/Transactions page and update it. But we don’t recommend changing the terminology over and over again, mainly because you don’t want to keep changing the screens that appear for your users.

Auto-Generated Numbers

By default, NetSuite uses names for ID fields rather than numbers. This means that the employee ID for Liza Minnelli would be Liza Minnelli rather than EMPLOYEE-0053. Using the auto-generated numbers feature, you can make NetSuite automatically generate ID numbers.

You can set up auto-generated numbers for three classes of things:

Entities (such as customers, jobs, employees, partners, or vendors)

Transactions

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) relevant items, like support cases or marketing campaigns

You can define your own prefixes and numbers, specifying the number of digits and the starting number. For example, you may designate that your customers be defined by the prefix GUEST followed by a four-digit number: GUEST-0001, GUEST-0002, and so on.

You can turn numbering on and off at any time. Say you use names for ID fields and then decide that you want numbers instead. When you click the Save button on the Set Up Auto-Generated Numbers screen, NetSuite goes through and numbers all existing records.

Be forewarned: Existing record numbers can’t revert back to names. If you later decide you don’t want numbers any more, NetSuite won’t revert existing records with numbers back to names. In other words, Liza Minnelli will be EMPLOYEE-0053, but new hire Sal Mineo will have an ID of Sal Mineo. It’s best to decide whether to use names or numbers at the outset so that all your records have consistent IDs.

General Preferences

The General Preferences page establishes some basic but very important options for your entire company. You can:

Designate the format for displaying time and date.

Set minimum password lengths and how long these passwords can be used before they expire.

Determine the font for your pages.

Specify which options individual users can override and which remain no matter what. (For example, maybe allowing employees to change the date format causes too much confusion because half of your employees put the month first and other half put the day first? Does 11-12 mean November 12 or December 11? To avoid such confusion, you can go to date format and uncheck Allow Override.)

Specify the languages available to your employees. Say your company has offices in Estonia, Tokyo, Qatar, London, Paris, and Buenos Aires. You can add Estonian, Japanese, Arabic, English, French, and Spanish so all six tongues appear as options for employees. Individuals can specify the language they prefer on their personal accounts. This ensures that your workers can access your records in any of these languages . . . but not Icelandic.

The steps for doing each of these are intuitive, so we won’t go into detail here.

Printing, Fax, and E-mail Preferences

You can customize templates for faxes, e-mails, and other forms. For example, you may want to include some boilerplate disclaimers in some of your standard forms like receipts, packing slips, or sales forms.

To set preferences like these, from the Setup tab menu, choose Company⇒Printing, Fax, and E-mail Preferences.

For example, your return forms and receipts may have a disclaimer that states that returns must be made within 30 days in original packaging. If you’re a reptile distributorship, you may add a disclaimer at the bottom of sales forms that declares “Not liable for snakes let loose in aircraft.” Important disclaimer text such as this can be added in the Sales Form Disclaimer entry box on the Printing tab. The Fax tab allows you to set preferences regarding how to e-mail faxes to recipients from NetSuite. The E-mail tab allows you to enter information so that e-mail from your company is not accidentally marked as spam. (See Chapter 11 for details on e-mail marketing.)

Getting picky about Set Preferences

Personal preferences allow you to tailor your account to meet your individual needs. To access the Set Preferences page shown in Figure 2-2, choose Set Preferences from the Home tab menu.

Figure 2-2: Tailor your account on the Set Preferences page.

Most preferences only allow you to make changes to the role you’re currently logged in as. Choosing a color theme in your Sales Person role, for example, doesn’t affect the color theme in your Administrator role. Other preferences, such as your language and time zone, apply to all of your roles. On the Set Preferences page, the label This Setting Applies to All Your Roles identifies preferences that apply to all roles.

The following list describes the tabs you see on the Set Preferences page, and what settings you can change on each tab. We also tell you the most important settings to make on each tab.

These preferences are a small subset of what NetSuite offers. As you become familiar with your account and your preference options, you will discover many settings that can help you speed up data entry, locate records, and improve your overall experience. Also, some preferences described in the following sections may not be available. The preferences you see depend on the features enabled in your account. Additionally, some preferences may be set at the company level by an administrator, and individual users can’t change those.

General

Settings on this tab include e-mail signature, time zone, and date, time, and phone-number formats.

Make sure the time zone is set correctly. Select the time zone you want to use from the Time Zone drop-down list to display time and dates on phone calls, events, tasks, cases, system-generated notes, and audit trails. The setting you choose for this preference will apply to all of your NetSuite roles.

In the Optimizing NetSuite section, the Maximum Entries in Dropdowns preference controls whether you do one of these two:

Type the first few letters and press Tab to make a selection on a form

Use a drop-down list

For example, if you change this field to 0, you always type the first few letters of a customer name on an order and press Tab to choose the correct name. If you set it to 500 (assuming you have <500 customers), this field appears as a drop-down list.

Appearance

Settings on this tab include colors, fonts, and user interface behavior.

If you want to change the default colors, select a new theme from the Color Theme drop-down list. Your chosen color theme applies to every page in your account. Choose from basic color themes such as Blue and Silver, or select a college theme such as Pac-10: UCLA. Administrators and users with the appropriate permission can create custom color themes from scratch for everyone in the company to use.

Two other fields affect your user experience:

Limit Entry Forms to Two Columns. Limiting entry forms to two columns creates a cleaner page than the default of three columns, so you may like that setting.

Expand Tabs on Entry Forms. This preference does away with NetSuite’s tabs and makes it into one long, scrolling page. The small double arrow button on the right side of each page lets you try this on for size before committing to it across the product.

Transactions

Settings on this tab include whether transactions should autofill, as well as options for various warnings, such as inventory-level warnings, customer credit warnings, or duplicate number warnings.

To enable the duplicate number warning (as in, “Hey, that’s the second Check 2005 you’ve entered today”), select the Duplicate Number Warnings check box. You select the other warnings in similar fashion. Of course, clearing the check box eliminates the warnings if you don’t need the safety net they provide.

Reporting/Search

Settings on this tab include report formats, the default bank account for reports, and the behavior of search options (such as Global Search).

We recommend making two settings on this tab:

Select the Global Search Auto Suggest check box. When this option is enabled, NetSuite automatically suggests matches for the text you enter in the Global Search field as you type. Records that display in the suggestion box are accessible by a single click, or by navigating with the arrow keys and pressing the Enter or Tab key.

Select All Reports from the Report by Period drop-down list (if you use accounting periods). You can change this setting as needed, but it should be the first thing you investigate if you’re seeing differing balances on reports.

Activities

Settings on this tab include calendar and task options.

If your company has many external contacts, partners, and vendors, the drop-down list you use when adding invitees to events can get very long. That can make it tough to find employees. Select the Restrict Invitees to Employees check box to restrict the Invitee drop-down list to only include employees.

Alerts

Settings on this tab include your e-mail address and times at which you’d like to receive e-mail alerts that contain your Home tab KPIs (such as Actual vs. Quota, if you’re a sales rep), as well as other information on your dashboard.

Alerts enable you to get your Home dashboard by e-mail three times a day. Choose from First Selection, Second Selection, and Third Selection drop-down lists, as shown in Figure 2-3.

Figure 2-3: Set up your e-mail alerts.

Restrict View

Settings on this tab include ways to filter the information you see in NetSuite. For example, you can use the Location drop-down list to restrict your view of items related to a particular corporate location. Use the Class drop-down list to restrict your view in NetSuite to include a particular class of customers or opportunities (such as those from the Web site, repeat customers, or seasonal sales).

Customizing Fields, Records, Forms, and Lists

After you set basic companywide preferences, think about how you want to customize NetSuite to your business processes.

NetSuite is a bit like clay. Don’t like the screens? Mold them into what you want. Don’t see the field you want on a given screen? Take a bit off the hunk and put it on there where the field should go. But seriously, you can add fields, records, forms, and lists.

You explore how to create custom fields, forms, records, and lists in more detail in Bonus Chapter 4 at www.dummies.com/go/netsuitefd.

Fields

Fields represent a single item of information. Custom fields extend the data for built-in records. This is where you can add the customer’s Twitter handle or her Facebook page or her blog as extra fields on the customer record.

Records

Records are a group of fields; in NetSuite you can think of the customer record in this category. (Chapter 3 describes records in more depth.) You may add a record for social networking information and include customer accounts on a variety of social networking sites.

With custom records you can:

Create a new custom record type.

Edit an existing custom record.

View a list of records that have been created using each custom record type.

Create a new record for a selected custom record type.

Create a new search for a selected custom record type.

Forms

Forms are the way you get information into a record. You may normally think of them as screens. You can add a field to an existing form or screen, or you can create a new form just to suit your information capture needs. You can reorganize these forms to better fit your business practices. You can take an existing template and rearrange or rename fields and tabs. You can conceal or disable fields, make some fields mandatory, or add custom fields, drop-down lists, and custom code.

You can customize forms (think “screens”) in NetSuite two ways:

Take standard options and configure them to suit your business processes.

Create entirely new forms from scratch.

NetSuite contains an array of standard forms such as customer records, sales orders, or estimates, to name a few.

Lists

Lists are simple screens that show information from a particular record type or types. The chart of accounts, the employee list, and the items list are examples of lists in NetSuite.

The simplest type of screen in NetSuite are lists. The customer list lists (you guessed it) customers. The employee list lists (that’s right) employees. You can add custom lists to create lists of star salespeople, exceptionally good customers, or even items frequently returned.

Bringing in Data

Happily, NetSuite has an excellent tool that brings in all types of data, whether employee data, customer data, or transactions. The CSV Import tool offers wizard-like functionality for bringing in text data that is in comma-separated variable (CSV) format.

CSV files don’t look beautiful in Notepad (all those commas can make your head spin as you track fields); Microsoft Excel is a much better tool for viewing these files. In fact, any Excel file can be saved as a CSV file. If you can get data either in CSV format or in Excel format (and then save it as a CSV file using the File⇒Save As option in Excel), importing it into NetSuite is a piece of cake. See Figures 2-4 and 2-5.

Figure 2-4: This is a CSV file in Notepad: pretty ugly!

Figure 2-5: This is a CSV file in Excel: pretty!

Saving an Excel spreadsheet as a CSV file

Save an Excel worksheet as a CSV file:

1. Open the worksheet whose data you want to save as a CSV file.

2. Choose File⇒Save As.

3. Choose Comma Separated Values (.csv) as the file format.

4. Click the Save button.

Thinking about data import

Once data is in CSV format, consider what the corresponding record is in NetSuite:

Employees

Customers

Contacts

Leads

Partners

Projects (if Advanced Projects is enabled)

Prospects

Vendors

Competitors

You will want to match the records in your CSV file with the corresponding records in NetSuite so each piece of information about employees (such as name, address, social security number, holiday fruitcake preference) can go into the corresponding field in NetSuite’s customer record. Don’t worry; the wizard will help you match things up.

Sometimes it’s obvious. Sometimes it isn’t. How can you look at NetSuite to find out what fields are stored in each record?

NetSuite makes it easy for you. The data in any one record is on the corresponding screen (employee data on the Employee screen, for instance). By going to that screen, you can see the fields in the record.

Variability comes in if you have created a custom form that shows only certain fields, for example. Of course, if you’ve added custom fields to a record, as outlined in Bonus Chapter 4, visit www.dummies.com/go/netsuitefd), you can also import data into those. You can import data into custom records as well.

Have a look at the standard form so you know what all the fields are. What if you don’t know what those fields mean? NetSuite field-level help to the rescue! Just click a field name on the Employee screen to see what a field refers to.

Using the CSV Import Assistant

The CSV Import Assistant is a wizard that helps you bring data into NetSuite. Its main use is to bring data into NetSuite when you start using NetSuite. But there are other uses, including bringing in:

Leads from lists sent by external firms or from tools used at trade shows

Payments from banks

Item price lists from vendors

Administrators can start the CSV Import Assistant this way: Choose Import/Export⇒Import CSV Records from the Setup tab menu. You see the initial screen of the Import Assistant, as shown in Figure 2-6.

Figure 2-6: Start the CSV Import Assistant.

The CSV Import Assistant walks you through the process:

Scanning and uploading CSV file or files (yes, you can import more than one at a time).

Specifying the nature of the imported data (new records that should be added, updates to existing records, or a mixture of the two, which as you may guess can get a little tricky).

Mapping files is optional. You only do this step if you’re importing multiple CSV files at the same time.

Mapping fields. This is where the beauty of the CSV Import Assistant really shines. You know what the data is called in your old system. If you called something “green cruciferous vegetable” and NetSuite calls the same thing “broccoli,” here is where you establish that mapping. Furthermore, if this is something you may do again, you can save the mapping and reuse it. See Figure 2-7.

The CSV Import Assistant is very straightforward and easy to use, but it includes advanced features that require deeper discussion. After all, we’re talking about your data here — a serious subject indeed. This book provides an overview. For detailed documentation, see the NetSuite Help Center (available by clicking the Help link in the upper-right corner of the screen).

Figure 2-7: Field mapping is easy if you’re using the CSV Import Assistant.

Custom Programming with SuiteScript

You can do your own programming on top of the NetSuite platform. SuiteScript is a JavaScript-based API that gives developers the ability to extend NetSuite beyond the point-and-click customization described in Bonus Chapter 4. This kind of advanced customization often requires a programmer. You delve into these capabilities in greater depth in Bonus Chapter 5 at www.dummies.com/go/netsuitefd.

Briefly, here are some of the things you can do with SuiteScript:

Custom business processing

Custom validations and calculations in the browser client

Create custom user interfaces

Run batch processes

Execute NetSuite searches

Utility processing such as sending e-mail and faxes, creating and uploading files, or working with XML documents (using script types such as User Event Scripts or Suitelets)

Create custom dashboard portlets

A related capability is the creation of workflows. Part of SuiteScript, the NetSuite Workflow Manager can use scripts, but is so easy that even nonprogrammers can use it. Workflow Manager can help set up approval processes and other workflows that match your company’s business processes and ensure that best practices are followed consistently.