4 ways Netsuite users can increase sales and profits with BI

For businesses leveraging a NetSuite ERP system, self-service sales reports are essential to drive growth. They provide sales teams with critical insights that help improve customer service, boost sales and offer a clearer picture of overall sales performance. Imagine quickly seeing your top 10 customers, understanding product bundles then proactively cross selling customers using these reporting tools. This level of real-time visibility is crucial for running a high-performing sales team to manage both risks and opportunities.

Accurate sales data empowers sales managers to optimize the sales pipeline, while sales reps can leverage product and behavioral insights to enhance customer relationships. And CFOs and other decision-makers also benefit with comprehensive financial reports that include sales data to assess profitability and financial performance. By analyzing specific key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics, businesses can identify sales trends, forecast future sales and streamline operations. Integrating other data such as CRM information with NetSuite data also enhances the analysis, offering a holistic view of customer interactions and sales performance.

Now, let's explore the four primary methods for generating sales reports within a NetSuite environment, outlining their pros and cons to help you determine what is optimal to boost your sales with your ERP data.

1. Excel workarounds

Many businesses, especially those without modern business intelligence solutions, rely on Excel for sales data analysis and reporting. While Excel is widely accessible and familiar, it presents significant limitations for comprehensive sales reporting. The process involves exporting data from NetSuite into spreadsheets, manually creating reports and often struggling with complex formulas.

Though Excel is common, it has limitations for detailed sales reporting. The process is time-consuming and even with lots of manual effort the data is still not live and prone to human error. It is also limited in scalability and challenging for complex reports as the file becomes so large. Sharing and collaborating on these reports is difficult, and Excel does not allow people to investigate the transactional data. While simple reports are manageable, complex analysis involving multiple variables and datasets require advanced Excel skills. The manual nature of this approach is especially problematic in fast-paced sales environments where real-time data is essential.

2. NetSuite reports

NetSuite offers a range of standard reports and the ability to set up saved searches via SuiteAnalytics and the NetSuite Analytics Warehouse product. These reporting features are difficult to manipulate and require a technical person to configure with SQL code to access the reporting capabilities.

This NetSuite native reporting falls short when addressing specific business needs. Although it is integrated with NetSuite, the customization options are limited, making it challenging for ad-hoc reports and difficult to slice and dice data as the pre-built reports are static. The technicality of the software requires skilled users for basic and advanced reporting and there is often a need to generate multiple reports to answer a single question so there can be delays if reporting is done just by the finance or IT team.

3. In-house solutions

Some organizations opt for in-house built databases, such as Access, Crystal Reports or custom cubes to build sales reporting to their specific needs.

While this approach offers customization, it demands significant resources for development and maintenance. The system's functionality is often tied to current processes and personnel, making it vulnerable to changes. Adapting to new technologies and evolving business needs can be challenging and expensive.

4. Integrated business intelligence (BI) tools

Business intelligence tools, particularly those designed for NetSuite integration like Phocas, offer a flexible and efficient approach to sales reporting. These tools provide intuitive interfaces, powerful data visualization capabilities and self-service dashboards and reports that update whenever the source data changes.

Phocas is also NetSuite SuiteCloud Developer Network Partner so the software integrates with pre-built connectors. This is a valued certification from NetSuite that validates the Phocas application for meeting NetSuite's high security, performance and integration standards.

BI tools address the limitations of other methods by providing customizable templates and drill down. They empower users to generate summary reports and dashboards without requiring advanced technical skills. This helps to streamline the sales process and custom reports to suit specific sales team by date range. These tools also allow for easy automation of reports and help to track sales orders, and understand the sales team performance but have permission-based usage to ensure people only see the information relevant to them.

By integrating with NetSuite, these tools offer seamless access to sales data, financial data and other relevant information. This enables sales managers and team members to access real-time data and generate comprehensive sales reports that drive informed decision-making.

Which method is best?

The optimal sales reporting solution depends on the specific business needs and resources of each organization. However, for businesses seeking a modern, efficient and scalable approach, integrated business intelligence tools offer significant advantages. By providing customizable reports and powerful data visualization, these tools empower NetSuite users to unlock the full potential of their sales data and use the insights to create sustainable growth. When looking into these tools, ensure that they are compatible with Oracle NetSuite and that they are able to handle all sizes of datasets.