From good to great: Elevate reporting and impress your CFO with Solution 7

See how Solution 7 transforms your financial reporting into a seamless, efficient process with the perfect blend of NetSuite’s power and Excel’s flexibility. In this live demo and interactive Q&A session, we’ll show you how Solution 7 saves time, simplifies workflows, and delivers insights faster—all without requiring technical expertise.
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With intuitive point-and-click navigation, real-time data updates, and custom GL functions, Solution 7 makes building and updating complex reports, budgets, and consolidations easier than ever. Its drill-down and drill-back functionality offers instant access to deeper insights, streamlining tasks like vendor expense analysis. Empower your finance team to focus on what matters most, delivering impactful results effortlessly—without the hassle of complex reporting processes.
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In this 45-minute webinar, you will:

• Discover how Solution 7 integrates seamlessly with NetSuite to enhance your financial workflows.
• Learn to create dynamic, visually stunning, and data-rich reports in Excel with ease.
• Explore real-world use cases that showcase time-saving features like real-time data refresh and drill-down insights.

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Transcript

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Nicky DeCarlo:
‍Thank you everyone for joining our webinar today From good to great: Elevate reporting and impress your CFO with Solution 7. I'm one of your hosts Nicky. I've been an account executive here at Zone for the past three years. I'm also joined by Phil Jose, one of our solution consultants on the Solution 7 side and Patrick Norton, another one of our solution consultants from the ZoneCapture side.

For today's session, we have disabled the chat just to keep the focus on our presentation. However, we do encourage you to use the Q&A function down at the bottom of the screen throughout the webinar to submit your questions. And we're going to take a few minutes at the very end to answer some of those questions live, if time permits. If we run out of time, we will get back to you on that.

As for today's agenda, who is Zone, in case you're new to us. If you're not, welcome. A live demo of Solution 7, where Phil is going to walk us through the tool. And at the end, we're going to have that Q&A, but we do encourage you to use that time to ask questions throughout the session.

So who is Zone? Zone & Co. is all about providing NetSuite native solutions designed to streamline finance operations from billing and payroll to approvals, reconciliation, and reporting. Our suite of products like ZoneCapture, ZoneApprovals, and more empower those finance teams. We do have over 4, 000 customers globally and over a decade of experience working in the NetSuite environment and in finance.

And with that, we'll go into the live demo, and I will pass it over to Phil.

Phil Jose:
‍Hi. So, yes, thank you for joining us today. Thanks, Nicky. Yeah, I'm, I'm Phil Jose. I've been a solutions consultant now working with Solution 7 for well over 10 years. So, I've got a good understanding of the product. And And here I am to show you a live demo. Before I show you the live demo, I've got a few PowerPoint slides to go through.

Hopefully you see my first NetSuite financial reporting in Microsoft Excel. So let's start off with why you might need Solution 7. Well, NetSuite's a great tool, has lots of lots of reports, a pretty comprehensive set of reports. But as with any ERP system, there comes a point where you just want more control over your reporting.

Perhaps there isn't the report that's quite in the format that you want to see. Perhaps you just want to add that presentation layer into into the reports that you're getting out of NetSuite. Now, what we see customers doing before finding Solution 7 is they will run those reports in, in NetSuite, they'll hit that little export to Excel button at the bottom of the screen or the top of the screen to get those out into Excel. And that's where the, the work can really start. Starting to combine those multiple reports, changing up the layouts. In some cases, just adding that that formatting layer into the reports.

All pretty time consuming can be quite cumbersome doing it that way to finally get out the reports that you want to see. With Solution 7, we automate the task to make it much easier for you.

Solution 7, it's an add in to Excel, brings into Excel a bunch of tools that you can use to build refreshable report templates. You build them once and then you've got them to refresh into the future. And when you hit that refresh, we're refreshing from your live NetSuite. So there's no middle data warehouse that can get out of sync and out of step with NetSuite. When you hit refresh, you've got the confidence that you're pulling the very latest numbers directly out of NetSuite.

Now notice that this arrow is two way that signifies that as well as pulling those reports, if you're building budgets or forecasts in Excel, perhaps layering those calculations on live assumptions pulled from NetSuite to get to those budgets and forecasts, once you've got that type of information built in in Excel, then you can hit a push button interface to push those numbers back into NetSuite.

And once in NetSuite, you've got the ability to build those great looking financial reports in the format that you want to see here, for example, is a variance report. We're looking at actual versus budget, not only for the current period, we've got a year to date position there. We've got a full year budget value. We've got last year actuals for comparative purposes.

So that's four reports in NetSuite that you would need to output to Excel and then manipulate to get them into this more cohesive format. With Solution 7, it's a refreshable report template. So once you've built it once, you can refresh it tomorrow, NetSuite, next month, whenever you want those latest numbers, hit the refresh and watch the numbers drop into place.

Also interactive reporting. So imagine if you were building a dynamic report in Excel, you'd set up parameters. Cells, you might have a cover sheet with those parameter cells. Changing those parameter cells would cause a dynamic refresh on your report. In the same way, with Solution 7, you've got those the same capability of building parameter cells. In this case, we've got a subsidiary in the head of there. We've got a period up there at the top of the report. We've got a budget category as well. Change any of those driver cells and the numbers will update and refresh into the report.

So that's a little bit about the reporting, and I will go into that live demo in just a moment. Before we do that, let's talk a little bit about Excel-based financial planning. We'll look in a moment how to pull numbers in that live refreshable format into Excel.

And once in Excel, you've got all of that freedom and flexibility that Excel offers. So you can build simple what-if scenarios, you can build first-cut budget templates, you can build extensive complex forecasting models, layering those Excel calculations, that Excel functionality on the live numbers pulled from NetSuite.

This bottom section, that That really represents our automation and distribution engine. And that's all about taking one of those single templates that you've built. Perhaps you want to repeat it across each of your departments for departmental reporting. Perhaps you want a, a mini P&L per location. Well, that's what automation is all about. It'll take that one template and repeat and copy it out, refreshing it out into many different sheets across whichever of those NetSuite dimensions you need to see it for.

Now, when we're talking about budgets and distributing those first-cut budgets, we might want some input from budget holders. They can interact with those distributed sheets. They don't need to have Solution 7 in order to do that, they simply update the numbers, add commentary into the Excel document that they see. They can then push that back to a central finance user who can do a final review before pushing those numbers back into NetSuite using that push button interface that we've developed. And once back in NetSuite, we've gone full circle. We can incorporate those new numbers into many different styles of reports.

We've looked at the variance report a moment ago. Here we're looking at a rolling forecast, rolling budget type report, looking at actuals up to the current period. And forecast or budget numbers, depending on the budget category that we choose, looking at those into the future. Again, refreshable. This time, if we update the period, for example, those columns will shift along as well as the numbers updating. So, lots of flexibility, lots of control in the types of reports that you want to build.

Now, all of this functionality within Solution 7 very easy for us to set up and get you started. It's a one hour implementation. We typically set up a one hour session to get you started on Solution 7. And as such, we offer a 30 day free trial of the software.

So if you're interested, then please contact the team after today's session. Now there is one prerequisite to that. Install. And that's a module from NetSuite called SuiteAnalytics Connect, a connector module that gives Solution 7 access to your NetSuite data.

Let me switch into Excel. Here's a blank workbook. And In the, in the ribbon there, we've got Solution 7 that appears as a menu item and that gives us access to all of that Solution 7 functionality. Lots of functionality there, lots of options on that menu.

But for this session, I'm going to concentrate on just two of those building blocks. Building blocks that we use to build summary type reports. Now, the most fundamental of those building blocks are our functions. If I go to the function button there, you'll see lots of options there. We can pull balances. We can pull budgets. We've got advanced balance and budget functions that extend the rate reporting capability. So you can report by customer, by vendor, by by item, by project, by many of those different dimensions within NetSuite.

We can report by dates, if you want weekly reporting, for example, we can achieve that using those types of functions rather than the periods. We can report non posting type transactions as well to report out sales orders, purchase orders and the like. So just lots of flexibility there in the types of reports that you want to build.

You may have noticed there's three options in many of those cases, simply because we might want to pull a balance or a budget by an account number. We might want to use the account names and that incorporates the hierarchies of accounts that you've got within NetSuite, or you might want to target the account types, so more summary type reporting.

Let's start with NSGLABAL, pulling a balance by an account number, and hopefully you'll recognize it's just Excel. Let me backtrack a moment, and I will type in some accounts that I can reference, accounts down the left. I'm just typing into cells here, so you don't necessarily need to lay out your reports like this. This is just one example that I'm giving. Periods across the top in this case, and I will stop at March.

You don't want to watch me typing, but let me go back to that. Function now, NSGLABAL. As we mentioned, it's just an Excel arguments dialog. We can reference cells, we can type into those arguments. We have extended this screen, so to save you switching back into NetSuite. Simply click the lookup button and that's your window into your NetSuite data. We can use that as a pick list, picking the value into the subsidiary there. Let's reference the account. I've typed it into the row header. So let's just reference that. Let's also reference the column header. We're only looking at a single period here, but. We could put in a range of period if you wanted full year quarter. If you wanted to build year to date, we can do that using those ranges of periods.

In these starter functions, we've got class, department, location, those primary segments that you've got within NetSuite. As I mentioned, the advanced balance functions, advanced function, budget functions give you more flexibility to that reporting capability.

Finally, on this screen, we've got the parent currency. There we can select a subsidiary, a parent subsidiary, whose currency we want to report in. In this case, I'm just going to go for subsidiary account and from period. And when I hit, okay. It's just pulled that number from NetSuite and dropped it into the cell.

It's now just a number in Excel. If we want to format those numbers, we just use Excel to do that. Here it's pulled that revenue number in a format that you would want to see in a trial balance. So pulled it through from NetSuite as a negative number. In some cases, in some reports, depending on the reporting that you're trying to achieve, you might just want to flip the sign to give you a positive number.

It is just Excel, so we can extend that out now by just copying it across, copying that down the report to build out the reporting. And, yes, I've done something wrong. So if I overtype that Account number, it will just dynamically update. So that's the primary building block, if you will. The functions that bring numbers from NetSuite into the report.

To support those numbers and to give us columns and row headers to reference, we also provide lists, column lists running down the page, row lists running across the page, pop up lists, we'll see in a moment, give us some interaction with the finished report, an easier interaction than just typing into cells.

So let me replace my account list with a list pulled from from NetSuite. Column list in this case, and you can see that we're just talking about those different dimensions that you've got within NetSuite. Let's take accounts by number. I'll use that lookup, again, just an Excel arguments dialog, lookup to select the consolidated option and then for followed by an asterisk, that wildcard character to match all trailing numbers so that we can filter that list on just just the revenue codes.

Let me Insert one of those pop ups, a pop up of subsidiaries. In this case, I don't want to filter the list. I'll just go ahead and hit OK. And that's populated that cell with the first value, but it's given us a way of interacting with that set cell value. Makes it easier than typing the subsidiary name into that cell.

Let me build the periods. I'm going to build the periods in a more intelligent way. Type in a year excuse that it's demo data. So back to 2023. Date function was what I was looking for. Let's take a January date or build a January date using Excel's date function. And let's format that as text using Excel's text format.

So that's that. If we use three character month, four digit year will give us an accounting period. Let's advance that into February. I'm going to use Excel's e date function, a great function to take my starting date and add a number of months. Now you may notice that I'm in the UK, we've got British date formatting, so day first, month second. But if I take my text formula across, you'll see that that's given me February, and I can now copy that right the way across the page to give me the full 12 month view.

Now I'm just using Excel to build those periods and that gives you complete flexibility on how you want to show those periods. If you want to see a rolling 12 months, a trailing 12 months, if you want to see current period alongside year to date to alongside same period last year, et cetera. All under your control, just using Excel formulas to build out those accounting periods.

Let's now drop in a couple of total headers, and that will complete the framework for the report. So now let's revisit that function. If I hit Excel's insert function dialogue, just like those built in functions. It'll show you the dialogue so that it's easier to work with. We could type into the into the formula bar there, but easier to pick from, from the from the workbook.

And let me just reference the subsidiary, making sure we anchor both the row and the column to, so that we're anchoring that cell. Hit OK. And we can now copy that across, copy that down the report. We've got the full 12 months. Let's add in some totals. Now a quick way of putting totals on both axes is to highlight the area that you want, including where you want the totals. And then we can simply use Excel's auto-sum feature. That'll drop the totals in and we're now we've got all the data we want. We're now into that presentation layer.

So I won't take this as far as you guys perhaps would want to take it. I'll just put in some borders to differentiate those totals. You might want to put that in corporate colors, add your logos, etc. Here I'm going to hide out that working row. I'll turn off the grid lines. Effectively, there is our finished report.

Now, a couple of things to note there. One is, our functions were just referencing column headers, row headers, interactive cells. It means that you've got total flexibility on how you want to present your data.

If, for example, you wanted different departments across the top, different class of business. Maybe you can have the departments down the left. You could have a list of all of your customers or all of your vendors down there and reference those with our functions to give you the types of reporting that you want. Total control, lots of flexibility in how you want to present your NetSuite data.

Now, the other thing to note is that because we are referencing those cells, as you saw when I corrected that account, if we change any of those driver cells, let's, for example, now use that pop up to select a Mexico subsidiary, see that it's updated and refresh that data.

Let's do the same and change. Change to a previous year. We might be looking back at a previous year. We might want to look into we might want to be moving into a new year. Just overtype that year cell. Because we've built the periods in a dynamic way, they all update and refresh. And that triggers a refresh on the data.

Solution 7 grabs that new data from NetSuite and drops it into the cells there. And that's what I mean when I'm talking about it being interactive reporting. We're not stuck with just one subsidiary. We can switch between different subsidiaries and the report will just update.

And then those automation features that helps us to automate those cell values. We just provide a bunch of names, Solution 7 will do that updating and refreshing across all of those NetSuite dimensions.

Let me pop that back to 2023 because I wanted to show you that all of our functions allow for drill down. So here we're looking just at those summary numbers. Solution 7 has pulled the summary numbers out of NetSuite to build that summary reporting.

But let's imagine that we want to get down to the underlying detail. Well, here all we need to do is right click the cell value. See down the bottom here, we've got drill down options. We could drill back to transaction detail, but at this high level view, it's often going to give us a lot of, a lot of data there.

So let's instead drill down by subsidiary, by the summary dimensions. There's our subsidiary split. We can drill down further. So let's take USA- right click, drill down by location. We can drill down any number of times. So let's take San Francisco and drill down by class of business. Ultimately, we may want to drill down to that transaction detail view. And so we right click the cell, go to that drill down, and we've got that transactional type view. So that's the lowest level breakdown of those summary numbers. Notice as well that it doesn't stop there. The reference is hyperlinked. That hyperlink will take us back into NetSuite, back into that source transaction within NetSuite.

And remember, we're reporting the live NetSuite data here. So if we do spot a transaction that's been mis keyed, perhaps it's been mis assigned to the wrong department, maybe we've got a transaction that has been missed completely. We can make that correction within NetSuite, come back to the report, and then we can hit the refresh option to to refresh and update the data into the report.

So hopefully that's given you a feel for the flexibility and the control that you can build into your reports, giving just refreshable reports. Build them once, refresh them again and again into the future and then added efficiencies to be gained and brought in by using that automation feature to automate your processes across all of your reporting. Many efficiencies to be gained.

So with that, thank you for for watching my quick run through of Solution 7 and just some of the features. Lots more to explore there. If you'd like to explore more, then please do get in touch.

Nicky DeCarlo:
‍All right, thank you very much, Phil. Now for our Q&A portion, we do have a couple questions. Phil, can we, can we add departments into that function argument? Do you want to show them how we can do that?

Phil Jose:
‍Ah, departments into the function. Yeah. So let's imagine that we do want another pick list for departments.

I'll insert a row to accommodate that. I'll use a pop up. We might want to add a column list or a row list. However you want to show those departments. I'm just going to reference a pick list, probably the quickest and easiest way to show that.

It'll show none. The first item is for those those transactions that haven't been assigned a department. So there's our pick list. All the departments listed down the left there. I've just realized that I may not have much in the way of departmental data in here, but let me go ahead and reference that department.

All we do, reference that back to our department cell. Hit OK, and that will then update and refresh. Now, sometimes we see a #N/A as it goes back to NetSuite. That's just Solution 7's way of saying, hang on, I'm busy. I'm getting that data from NetSuite. And once it gets it, it'll refresh and update into the cell. So now we've got a departmental report.

Choose a different department. Then, looking at those numbers, I don't think I've got anything in any other department here. Let's try sales. Okay, a couple of numbers there. It's demo data, so I'm not overly surprised. But also a hidden extra is if you type an asterisk, that wildcard character into your into your pick list, that will again give you the whole list. So that'll match everything.

Nicky DeCarlo:
‍Perfect. Thanks, Phil. We got a couple more. So this one says we've got several custom fields that we want to report on. Can Solution 7 bring those in?

Phil Jose:
‍Yes, indeed. So we can, we can add those into Solution 7. This is a starter function, so that is a little bit fixed in capability.

Class, department, location are the segments there. But if you want to extend that with your custom segments, we'd use one of those advanced functions NSGLAPBAL, for example, pulling the balance by an account period. And again, those first few arguments, just the same as we had before. I'm going to do subsidiary. I'm going to grab the account just like we did for that previous function.

But this time, instead of having those set placeholders. We do things slightly differently. We give you the ability to choose in the option which dimension you want to use. So let me use that department. This list can be extended. So your custom segments and custom fields will be included at the bottom here. And then you'd also get lists so that you can incorporate those dynamic lists into the reporting as well.

I'm going to show you with department just because we've got it on screen there. Click into the department. And then choose the value for that department. So in this case, I've got it in that pick list. Hit OK. We'll get that same number back because we're using the, the, the same department numbering. But the key there is that we can extend it with those custom fields and custom segments.

Nicky DeCarlo:
‍Perfect. Okay. We got two more. Is it possible to provide our own grouping on our chart of accounts and summarize by those groupings?

Phil Jose:
‍Yes, absolutely. So to do that, lots of different ways you can provide that ad hoc grouping. For example, down here, I'm going to, well, let me copy that that same formula. I'll paste it down below the totals. We'll get a # error to begin with, a #VALUE, because we haven't provided a, a, an account. But if we wanted to do some kind of grouping, we can use 4 and asterisk there. Or, the alternative is to add a custom field, a custom, a custom field, a grouping field onto the account. And then that just becomes a a custom field within the functions like I showed previously. And incidentally, 4*, the same as the list there, that can also work well as a, a check number.

So we've got the total there. If those two tie out, which they do at the moment, we know we've got all of the detail. But if that list is missing any values for whatever reason, perhaps we've extended the chart of accounts, then it's immediately apparent that there's something amiss.

Now, one thing I didn't I talked about it very briefly, but I didn't show, was that these lists are dynamic. So right click the list, we can refresh that list. That's gonna re-pull that list from NetSuite. It'll insert the missing numbers and it'll extend out the, the formulas to the side to close up the close up the gap. And we should see those numbers come back into balance as it does so.

Nicky DeCarlo:
‍All righty, Phil.

And then last one. If I share a refreshable report with users that don't have Solution 7, will the functions error in Excel and is there also a way to prevent that when sharing those finished reports?

Phil Jose:
‍So, yes, absolutely. If you don't have Solution 7 and you try to open this document, then your Excel won't recognize those functions.

So you'll get a #NAME error. But we've got functionality to to deal with that. We've got locking options. Let's take a lock. Let's lock that sheet. Essentially, that is, that's breaking the ties with NetSuite. It's taking the formula and hiding it behind an always true if statement. So every user that opens this report now will see that static number.

Solution 7 users have the option of either unlocking it to refresh it in the future, or we can just keep it locked because on the refresh option, if I was to refresh that, there is the option to include those locked formulas and refresh those as well. So that gives us a, in that locked state, it can be shared with any Excel user. They don't have to have Solution 7. They'll just see the static values.

Nicky DeCarlo:
‍Okay. Perfect. Thanks, Phil. Oh, that was the last one of our questions. Thank you all for, for joining us. And I hope you all have a great rest of your day slash weekend.