NetSuite Planning and Budgeting Phase II (NSPB)

Now that you have been up and running with NSPB are you ready for Phase II?

What are some things that the system can do for me to make my life easier?

A proper Phase II should include thinking through the following:

  • data level backups, 20 day moving history
  • environment moving 20 day backups kept onsite
  • Admin guide:
    • documents backup / recovery options and process to restore
    • monthly and annual system updates needed for substitution variables, archiving of forecasts, etc.
  • What if modeling:
    • creating a different version of budget for best case scenario
  • User of business rules:
    • Business rules allow you to update many / hundreds of cells of data from a single command. You can easily change sku level prices by product line, geography, or customers. It is easy to apply a 5% growth factor to revenue by any slice you can think of while also reducing expenses by a %.
  • Automated report distribution:
    • While having NSPB in production has saved some time, your key financal analyst is still busy producing daily / weekly / monthly reports. This is partly because no other users have been provisioned in the system and they cannot use the web forms or delivered canned FR reports. This gives you 2 options:
    • 1. One option is to purchase / leverage additional licenses then implement a security matrix.
    • 2. You could implement an excel / smartview solution that can automatically update all the reports then both email them and post on a drive portal for the users to consume.
  • Creation of additional stat accounts and metrics for reporting purposes that you did not think of during the initial implementation. Also validation that the current statistics are in fact calculating correctly.
  • Enable additional users to use the system
    • One reason why no other users are allowed in the system is because the security design has not been created to limit users from seeing the salaries of all employees. A phase II task could be to design and create / provision the appropriate security so other users can use the web forms (submit their own budget data) and run their own reports.
  • Review of current reports in use and the refresh performance. What is the expected performance of a report in NSPB? If you have reports taking over 2 minutes these need to be looked at. I’ve seen multiple clients with individual reports taking from 8 to 45 minutes.