6 signs you need a better NetSuite reporting tool

NetSuite is a powerful enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, but when it comes to reporting, many finance teams find themselves hitting a wall. Financial and operational reporting is essential for running a business, yet generating timely, accurate and specific reports from NetSuite often requires a heavy lift from finance teams and that’s just the beginning.

If your team is constantly frustrated by manual workarounds, a lack of self-service or inflexible formatting, it might be time to consider a better way. Here are six signs your organization has outgrown native NetSuite reporting tools and needs a more intuitive and automated solution.

1. Reporting at scale is too manual due to lack of automation

Month-end reporting shouldn’t feel like it requires more effort than it should for a recurring process. But for many finance teams using NetSuite, the reporting process is slow, repetitive and overly dependent on manual tasks. Board packs, management reports, KPI dashboards, and financial statements often require data dumps, complex Excel templates and cross-checking between departments.

One of the biggest challenges is combining financial and non-financial data. NetSuite stores data in silos. So financial information might sit in the accounting module, operational metrics in inventory and customer insights in CRM or other systems. Worse still, not all business-critical data lives in NetSuite, which means teams rely on exports and manual integrations that are time-consuming and error-prone.

Without a tool that automates data consolidation and delivers reports from a single source of truth, your reporting efforts will never scale efficiently.

2. Finance teams are relied on for all reporting

NetSuite’s reporting is technically intensive. Even routine queries require a deep understanding of saved searches and report creation. So often only the finance team or technically trained consultants can generate meaningful outputs and carry out data analysis from the rigid prebuilt templates.

That creates a major bottleneck.

Colleagues in sales, operations or purchasing can’t self-serve business performance without a user-friendly interface. Instead, they depend on finance to create and run reports, answer ad hoc questions and troubleshoot access issues. When even finding the right saved search is difficult due to naming duplication or a complicated interface - it’s easy for users to get overwhelmed or give up.

A better tool will provide self service reporting, strong data governance and clear role-based permissions so more people can get the answers they need without burdening finance. When reporting becomes intuitive and accessible, the whole business benefits from being able to make informed decisions.

3. Financial reports lack visualizations and flexibility

Finance teams need to be storytellers who drive valuable conversations across a business. So static, spreadsheet-style reports don’t connect with team members or provide quick clarity.

NetSuite’s native reporting outputs are often data-heavy, lacking visuals like charts or trendlines. So sharing performance insights with non-financial stakeholders can be difficult for the lack of visibility and dashboards. Leaders want to quickly grasp a decline in revenue or see cost variances at a glance, but tables of data make this challenging.

A modern reporting tool should let you visualize key metrics, track trends over time, and drill into outliers without relying on third-party tools or complex workarounds.

4. It’s a struggle to customize financial reports for your business needs

Every business has unique reporting needs, yet NetSuite often forces finance teams into one-size-fits-all templates. While standard reports might cover the basics (revenue, COGS, expenses), they often fail to capture the nuances that matter most such as custom key performance indicators (KPIs), blended margins or department-level performance.

If your team is constantly exporting data to rework it in Excel or building overly complicated saved searches just to calculate a new metric, that’s a red flag. NetSuite's reporting is rigid and not easily adapted to the evolving needs of the business.

Finance leaders need flexibility and the ability to consolidate subsidiaries, filter reports by specific segments and define their own formulas. A purpose-built reporting tool can consolidate all your data sources and reduce the reliance on manual methods.

5. Sharing reports is difficult and inconsistent

It’s one thing to create reports but sharing them securely is another story. Many organizations face limitations when trying to distribute reports from NetSuite. Data access controls are clunky or insufficient, and sensitive financial data can’t easily be segmented by user role or responsibility.

As a result, finance teams resort to creating multiple versions of the same report, one for each stakeholder or department just to control what’s visible. This approach leads to version control issues, no real-time visibility and delayed decisions.

A connected reporting platform like Phocas BI and FP&A consolidates all your financial data and enables multi-entity report sharing with built-in access controls. Users see only the data they’re authorized to view, and reports are always up-to-date. No more emailing spreadsheets or managing a tangle of permissions.

6. You can’t drill into transactional data

One of the most frustrating limitations in NetSuite reporting is the lack of easy slice and dice reporting. When a report shows an unexpected variance or an unusual trend across inventory management, business people need answers - fast. But in NetSuite, tracing a number back to its source often requires multiple steps, saved searches or even separate data exports.

This slows down decision making and makes root-cause analysis harder than it should be.

Modern reporting tools offer real-time drill-downs into transactional data. When you can move from a high-level P&L straight into invoice or journal detail with one click, troubleshooting becomes simple. Finance teams can spend less time hunting for answers and more time delivering insights that guide better business outcomes.

Dean Nicolaides, Senior Management Accountant at Zeder, works hands-on with NetSuite and Phocas. He values the ability to extract data directly from NetSuite and the data structure that Phocas has helped them set-up, calling it the backbone of the company’s financial performance system.

"We now have the granularity of reporting to pinpoint the root causes of variances and performance issues. When we spot a trend, we action it immediately. There’s a huge ROI on that.”
Dean Nicolaides, Senior Management Accountant at Zeder

The NetSuite ERP is robust, but its native reporting capabilities were not designed for detailed and complex reporting nor were other tools added after the Oracle merger. If your reporting is manual a process and everyone is relying on your for answers, you’re not alone.

These six signs are your signal that it’s time to explore a better reporting solution that integrates with NetSuite data, automates management and financial reporting and empowers users at every level.

A modern BI and FP&A platform like Phocas, a trusted NetSuite partner, can transform the way your business uses real-time data for custom reports, budgeting and forecasting.