There’s no doubt that reporting is a critical function for businesses of any size. It’s not just about putting data into spreadsheets and colorful graphs, however. It’s the strategic insight gained that helps drive decisions and actions in a competitive marketplace. If, however, the business lacks resources, technology, or even expertise, reporting can become a bigger burden than a boon, and by the time reports are constructed, they’re too outdated for much sound decision-making.
Enter NetSuite. This ERP comes with advanced capabilities in data organization and retrieval—but even still, users can bump into limitations.
Which might be why you’re here, too. You love NetSuite, you love data, heck, you might even really love a good spreadsheet report. But your NetSuite reporting sure could use some leveling up.
You’re not alone. We see this with businesses all the time. In fact, that’s why we do what we do: Excel and NetSuite integration that make your reporting and data updates easier, automated, and more accurate.
But don’t just take our word for it. These three organizations each learned something new when they started using ExtendInsights. So take a seat and read on for some notes, class is in session.
Lesson 1: A Little Bit Goes A Long Way
Jack Lingo Asset Management (JLAM) is a real estate investment and development firm that helps people build wealth through private real estate. JLAM’s controller, Ian Goodenough, works with both NetSuite and multiple outside systems. Centralizing reporting in NetSuite involved multiple data imports that were first entered into Excel templates and then uploaded natively into NetSuite via CSV imports.
JLAM benefitted from ExtendInsights’ NetSuite capabilities immediately without needing a team of three or four people to simply go through to classify and reconcile data. In fact, he describes ExtendInsights as providing “a lot of muscle” to enable JLAM with better reporting, organization, and information behind their financial data.
Ian is now able to upsert data into NetSuite almost instantaneously via ExtendInsights. The real-time data validation saves valuable upload time and speeds the process by letting him know right away what’s wrong and how to correct it. “Utilizing ExtendInsights has refined the import process, reducing the time from one minute when performed through NetSuite’s native interface to a swift 10 seconds,” Ian said. “It doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re importing a lot of different data from other places, it adds up to a lot.”
Lesson 2: Stop. Copying. And. Pasting. (It’s Just Not Worth It!)
Home decor pioneer brand MacKenzie-Childs creates some of the most sought-after unique and joyful handmade pieces. The designer brand focuses on expressing artistic freedom, invoking joy, and infusing every corner of the home with originality. They manage omnichannel sales and needed to consolidate reporting, which led chief of staff Liz Rozwood, to implement NetSuite. Yet, because of the complex needs, reporting remained an intensely manual copy-paste process, taking up as many as 20 hours per week to accomplish.
That’s when Liz found ExtendInsights and added its Excel integration reporting capabilities to MacKenzie-Childs’ ERP. Using ExtendInsights, the team is now able to have hourly data seamlessly integrated into Excel, effortlessly see and adjust on goals year over year, provide sales teams with comprehensive item availability data, run detailed analytics, dissect oversized saved searches, and leverage PowerBI to reassemble fragmented data, create dashboards, and embed those dashboards back into NetSuite. “CloudExtend makes it so we’re not wasting 20 hours a week copying and pasting,” Liz noted. “Instead, we’ve freed up to 1,000 hours a year for new analysis and driving the business forward.”
Lesson 3: Ditch the CSV (It Can Be Done!)
Background check and drug screening solution provider ClearStar moved from QuickBooks to NetSuite in order to automate accounting processes as the company grew. But reporting and loading data into NetSuite—and then getting it back out again for use—still ended a better process. Due to the volume and complexity of data involved, the native CSV process simply wasn’t fast enough.
When ClearStar added ExtendInsights, the game changed completely. Now, the organization has streamlined how it updates NetSuite data as well as automated reporting. “Every day, I am using ExtendInsights, updating thousands of records,” Craig said. “If it wasn’t for ExtendInsights, I wouldn’t be here because there’s no way I could do this manually. I think it’s saved a whole year of my life, which is a little bit crazy to think about. But to be honest, I can’t imagine doing my job without ExtendInsights.”
Putting It into Practice
Whether your organization needs to streamline data updates, cut out the manual copying and pasting practices, or find little changes that can add up to a whole lot, ExtendInsights is an excellent place to start.
Curious what lessons you could learn? Give ExtendInsights a try completely free for two weeks and bump your NetSuite reporting to the head of the class.