NetSuite for the Service Industry
NetSuite offers a unique set of features and functionality that can be tailored to the specific needs of service industry businesses—such as consulting, advertising, software development, web design, publishing, and marketing. NetSuite offers a robust set of customizable features to integrate and streamline your business processes from start to finish no matter what type of services you are delivering to your customers.
The following features are essential for success with NetSuite in a service business:
Dashboards and Reporting for Services
NetSuite lets you customize how people you do business with interact with your information using roles, permissions, and dashboards.
Roles and Permissions
You give access to NetSuite by granting access and assigning a role to your employee, customer, vendor, and partner records within NetSuite. The type of information and access each person has depends upon the role you assign. NetSuite offers standard roles that can be customized to add or remove specific permissions to meet the needs of your business.
For example, you can create a role for your Sales department to give them access to client records, sales goals, transactions, and time tracking. You can also create a specific role for your project managers with access to resource management, client records, projects, and time tracking.
For more information on roles and permissions, see NetSuite Users & Roles.
Dashboards
One of the most powerful tools for success in your business is your NetSuite dashboard. Your dashboard offers you customized, at-a-glance access to the most important and relevant information about your business. Each role has a dashboard tailored directly to the type of information needed most. For example, your sales managers can see real-time information on sales goals and lead generation. Your project managers can see updated information on resource availability, project progress, and profitability.
Dashboards can be customized by individual users to add and remove portlets. In addition, administrators can create and publish dashboards to specific roles and limit the available customizations. Dashboards are a powerful tool for your business by giving your employees access to the information they need at their fingertips.
For example, your sales managers may want to include Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for income, sales, subscriptions, and commissions. Project managers may want to include project profitability, utilization, open projects, and task completion rates. Adding this type of information to the dashboard offers easy access to specific, real-time comparisons of relevant data.
NetSuite offers a wide variety of standard KPIs that can be added to your dashboard. You can also add custom KPIs that you define with a report or saved search allowing you to further tailor the information on your dashboard.
For more information on dashboards, see Dashboards Overview.
Client Management for Services
Client management is a key component to success in the services industry. In order to deliver your product you must first interact and understand your client’s needs. NetSuite’s features make focusing on your client’s needs easy and seamless throughout the creative process. The client management features are fully integrated allowing you access to all the information you need at the click of a mouse.
Events
NetSuite’s calendar and event records allow you to keep track of client and project meetings in one central place. You can schedule events on-the-fly from the Calendar portlet on your dashboard and attach those meetings to specific projects or customers. Within customer and project records, you can see a list of all the past and future scheduled events on the Related Records subtab.
For more information on events, see Working with Your Calendar and Activities and Working with Events.
CRM Tasks
CRM task records are an excellent way for you to keep track of non-project work your employees need to complete within a certain time. CRM task records can be created by employees and can also be created and assigned by supervisors. CRM task records can be linked to customer and project records and time can be tracked directly from the record.
For more information, see Working with CRM Tasks.
Phone Calls
Phone call records are a great way to keep track of important client and vendor calls. Phone call records capture important information about the phone call, such as the topic, organizer, and date completed. You can show scheduled calls on your calendar and link call records to customer, contact, and project records. You can also track time directly from phone call records.
For more information, see Working with Phone Calls.
Mobile
The NetSuite comprehensive support for mobile devices (iOS and Android) ensures that your business users get real-time access to the information they need, whether it's the latest metrics, calendar information, customer details, or more. And, because NetSuite is cloud-based, you can empower your workforce with mobility to log in anytime, anywhere.
Depending on your role within your company, you can use the NetSuite mobile app to take your work with you anywhere you go. Employees that log time and expenses can do so right from their phones. You can even start a timer when you begin a task and stop it when you’re finished and NetSuite will record the duration automatically when you log the time. Project managers and account representatives can access important financial information about clients and projects using reports and saved searches directly from their phones. Having access to all the information you need right there on your mobile device offers a new flexibility and agility to service based businesses.
For more information, see NetSuite for Mobile Overview.
Project Management for Services
Project management is an essential part of a successful service business. With NetSuite Project Management, Resource Allocations, and Job Costing and Budgeting you can plan, manage, and track all your company’s projects. Each project is also seamlessly integrated with your other business systems.
Projects
NetSuite project records allow you to capture and track all the information for your client’s on-going projects in one place. You can use project tasks to plan each step of the process and assign the required resources. With Job Costing and Project Budgeting, you can set both cost and billing budgets at the project and project task level. This lets you closely monitor your project profitability and keep a close watch on the financial impact of each project. After your projects are planned, your resources can track time against their assigned project tasks and the actual costs are recorded against the project.
For more information, see Using Project Management and Job Costing and Project Budgeting.
Resource Allocations
The Resource Allocations feature lets you fine tune your resources to work more efficiently for your clients. Resource allocation records allow you to allocate the necessary resources to each project prior to assigning individual tasks. Using the Resource Allocation Chart/Grid you can see a visual representation of how your resources are allocated. You can easily drag and drop records adjusting your allocations to balance your resources.
For more information, see Resource Allocations.
Project Templates
Project templates make it even easier for your business to streamline your processes. You can create project templates for the types of projects you complete repeatedly. After a project template is complete, the setup time is reduced and you can get started on the work that much faster. You can also use generic resources with project templates to further streamline your processes. With project templates and generic resources you can set project budgets, create project tasks, and even assign resources. When it’s time to create a new project, you can create it directly from the template with the click of one button.
For more information, see Resource Allocations and Generic Resources.
Accounting for Services
Accounting processes and software are an integral part of any business but NetSuite goes one step farther and integrates your other important processes with your accounting system. This integration is key to reducing errors and ensuring you have the information you need in real time to make business decisions.
Integrated Accounting
Many services companies rely heavily on a project-based structure when organizing their work. Whether it’s a marketing campaign, consulting work, or website design there is work to be done that requires resources to complete tasks and log their time. In NetSuite, you can create projects with an automatic accounting impact. You set up your projects, assign tasks, and as your employees complete work and log time the accounting impact is recorded. You can take that logged time and generate paychecks for your employees and bill the costs directly to your customers.
The accounting features aren’t restricted just to projects. Your sales reps and support reps can also track time that can then be billed back to customers. Time can be tracked on event, CRM task, and phone call records as well. Your sales reps can create sales orders, invoice customers, and accept customer payments all with or without being attached to a project record. NetSuite offers tools to manage subscriptions as well as a robust set of standard accounting and reporting features to serve as the backbone of your business.
For more information, see NetSuite Accounting Overview and Managing Time Tracking.
Project Billing
When setting up a project in NetSuite, you have several options for project billing. You can select from time and materials, interval, milestone, and charge-based billing. Each option offers different functions and advantages and NetSuite offers you the freedom to tailor each project to your customer’s needs. You can create billing schedules to determine how and when your customers are billed for project work. With charge-based billing you can even create specific rules based on time, fixed fees, and expenses.
For more information, see Project Billing and Charge-Based Project Billing.
Customization for Services
NetSuite is highly customizable to your business. You can create custom lists, records, fields, and even custom workflows to gather important information and automate company-specific processes.
Custom Lists, Records, Forms, and Fields
These features, knows as SuiteBuilder, allow you to easily adapt NetSuite to meet your company's business process. You can control the information that is accessed and entered by each user of your NetSuite account. SuiteBuilder provides a simple point and click interface for creating custom fields and forms, custom record types, transaction form layouts, and custom centers.
For more information, see Customize Your NetSuite Account.
SuiteFlow
SuiteFlow lets you create custom workflows to further tailor NetSuite to your company by automating your custom business processes. For example, you can use SuiteFlow to manage transaction approval, lead nurturing, and record management. SuiteFlow uses triggers to transition records through various states that you define. As the record progresses through the business process, the workflow updates the record accordingly. SuiteFlow is a very powerful tool for creating streamlined, automated processes within your NetSuite account.
For more information see, SuiteFlow Overview.