Own your NetSuite Data with Zone data portal

As promised, we’re delivering even more flexibility and control to your financial data strategy!

See the first-ever look at the Zone Data Platform data portal—a self-service hub designed for seamless data management, transformation, and visualization. Beta customers are already predicting time savings of 10 months to 2 years, calling the data portal a “clean” way “to have ownership” over their NetSuite data.

This one-stop shop delivers our customers’ #1 wish: the ability to harness, control, and fully own their NetSuite data—then blend and use it as needed. The data portal equips ZoneReporting and Zone Data Warehouse users with power tools for data editing, ETL, and automated workflows, seamlessly integrating NetSuite and other sources with their destination of choice. Currently in beta, it will soon be available to all.

In just 30 minutes, you’ll learn:

• How the data portal enhances automation across reporting and analytics
• Real-world feedback from customers on their use cases and goals
• A live demo showcasing key capabilities of the data portal
• Insights from our product team on what’s next for Zone Data Platform

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Transcript

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Becca Byers: So today we're delighted to share with you how you can own your own NetSuite data with the Zone Data Portal. Today, you'll be hearing from myself and Gilberto Diaz, our Director of Product, focusing on our data solutions.

Who is Zone & Co? That's the first thing we're going to be talking about. Then get a little bit into the evolution of NetSuite reporting. And how people are moving from ad hoc to automated reporting and how our Zone Data Platform supports that and why we built the data portal. We'll get into a live demo of the data portal and finally have just a few moments we hope for Q&A.

Now let's talk just for a second about Zone & Co. So if you're already a customer, we're so happy to have you here. And if you're new to Zone, welcome. Zone & Co is all about providing NetSuite native solutions designed to streamline finance operations from billing and payroll to approvals, reconciliation, and reporting, Zone's, suite of products and power finance teams to complete their workflow with less manual work. We have over 4,000 customers globally and over a decade of experience working in NetSuite and in finance, which turns out to be really handy when it comes to NetSuite reporting.

So with that, we're next going to talk a little bit about how we're starting to tackle those challenges with Zone Data Platform by showing a little bit of how reporting from NetSuite has evolved over time. When we look at the evolution of NetSuite reporting first, we've got these standardized reports, those handy out of the box reports that are great for specific areas of NetSuite.

Then there's save searches, which is the beloved way to easily query and find any record that you are looking for. But of course, those don't have visualizations. So that brings us to SuiteAnalytics, which has some visualizations but also some limits. It uses a different data source and a different data schema or language than what we're used to from saved searches, and that can cause a little bit of a usability curve. Plus there's some limits in how many visualizations you can make.

So that takes us to NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, which is this really complex enterprise grade tool on Oracle Autonomous Database. And that's something that people are using within the NetSuite ecosystem to kind of display your data within that NetSuite space.

But we find that many people do want to display their data to stakeholders outside of NetSuite in the format that they're looking for, and that's why Zone Data Platform exists-- to display those reports and to give you control and flexibility over your data to take it wherever your stakeholders need that. In whatever format they're asking it for, and also in a way that is automated and not ad hoc.

So I'm going to turn things over to Gilberto, who has so much to share in how Zone has created this data platform and made this motion on your behalf from ad hoc to automated.

Gilberto Diaz: Thanks, Becca, and thanks everyone for joining.

You know, looking back and reflecting on our poll automation it is quite difficult. I think a lot of people underestimate what it takes to automate. And so usually what happens is they spend a lot of time redoing these reports, maybe month end or quarter end or whatever it may be. The question throughout this presentation, just think about it-- if you are able to do this, why not do it? So it could get updated multiple times a day. That way when it comes to the end of month, it's already been updated. So just keep that in mind.

So let's go from a discussion point, moving from ad hoc reporting to automation. because it seems like that is the thing to focus on if you're able to do that in a good way. Hopefully you'll be able to address those many ad hoc reports and scale your operations instead of being dragged down.

So we did a little bit of thinking. I think one of the terms that I want us to focus on is Data as an Asset. And how important data is to drive those reports.

So sometimes, you know, we get asked to create a BI report or several BI reports et cetera, et cetera. Maybe they're constantly changing reports. And these all have varying levels of impact, right? It could impact the business financials. It, it could be part of the month end, close et cetera. But you know, you have to start to understand: what are those business questions and use cases that you're trying to address? What are those insights that we're looking to understand?

So part of step one is to define with those use cases, what are the respective critical domains that play a role in getting all the relevant information needed to address those use cases, right? And you start to look at some of these things, you start to bucket it into workflows. You know, maybe those workflows are around finance and accounting, maybe they're around sales and marketing et cetera.

Well, there's systems behind it. And whether you use NetSuite for it all or use a combination of NetSuite and other systems, you start to define those business domains and you start to understand that sometimes they need to be brought together.

Right, so, so here, just let's go through a couple of examples in the ERP space, from the chart of accounts to department, to subsidiaries, and for those more complex organizations of multi-subsidiary to those that are dealing with either single currency or multicurrency. You pair that up with either a NetSuite CRM or even Salesforce and you want to look at opportunities. You know, contacts, customers, et cetera. You want to bring all this together. This is very important to start to understand the data domain.

Once you start to do that, then step two. You go into establishing a centralized data model because, perhaps, that is going to give you the benefit of reusing a lot of that work that you've done before.

I'll go through a, a couple of examples later of what that means. But basically it's a decision around what belongs in the centralized data model versus what belongs in the BI layer, right?

So a couple of the things that we highlighted here are the following: is the data used in multiple BI reports. Well, if so, that's a great sign that perhaps that belongs in a centralized data model.

Do you do a lot of ad hoc tweaks in customizations at the BI layer? Well, if that's, so maybe that stays in the BI layer.

And the most important one is: would you benefit, like provide an actual business benefit, whether it's revenue generating or cost cutting, from having data consistency and automation? That obviously depends on the workflow that you're handling, but if so, again, centralized data model is going to give you a lot of rewards.

Alright, so let's say you agree centralized data model sounds great, especially because you want to tackle those use cases with those data domains and data sources. Well, how about empowering? And this is a term that's been used by democratizing the data assets to enable self-service across not only the data, but the analytics.

So what does that mean really opening it up and making it available to your organization so that peers could go in, look at the data, look at any of the calculations you might have done in the data and question it or refine it, and everybody should be on the same page as long as, which is step number four, you have a good data governance framework, right? That's important because if somebody changes a measure calculated column or even the filtering of a data, it's going to throw everybody off. It's going to get ultra complex when you're trying to do the, the validation at the end of the year, right? When you're trying to just make sure everything matches up. It's going to be painful without a good data governance framework. So that's important.

And then finally, if you get all of these things in place, right? The next role is to just promote a data culture, right? Instead of talking about BI reports talk, start talking about the importance of getting the data right, making it available within your organization, and that becomes a term that you use throughout the day. Data, the data itself, the data sets, the sources et cetera.

All right, so, you know, let's take a quick look at the differences between common problems and with Data as an Asset, what it looks like, what it might look like. And I won't go to the details, but maybe now I'll give you an example of a report.

You get asked to do, a financial overview of your organization. And you embark on this journey, right? You start to piece things together. I'm just going to go through a couple of common ones that you guys should be familiar with-- balance sheets, income statements, cash balances, accounts receivable, et cetera.

And then on top of that. You know, you go into your ERP and you start to gather that raw data, right? Like what is the actual raw data that I need to go in NetSuite for an example, maybe you have a whole bunch of saved searches, maybe look at all those data things. That includes the chart of accounts, the customers, the items, and then you need to bring it together. Right?

But when you bring it together for a lot of these reports, you're probably going to have to do some calculations, right? Somebody wants an inventory turnover ratio of their supply chain. Somebody wants to look at days payable outstanding. How about adding time intelligence, right? That seems a lot complex. Current month, month over month, year over year, quarter over quarter, this half to last half et cetera. Those are a lot of things to do. And now once you get it all done, imagine somebody ask for the report in a slightly different way with slightly different data.

It'd be great, if looking at this picture, you had a unified, repeatable, governed set up for your data pipeline, that should allow you to easily address those problems leveraging what you've done in the past in the right space.

Maybe you've already got all that data in and maybe you just need to tweak a measure. Maybe you just need to tweak the title of report and what visualizations has done there. That is the benefit of having this Data as an Asset mentality and going through the steps above to organize your organization in this way.

Hopefully to address all those type of ad hoc reports in an automated fashion. Becca.

Becca Byers: A hundred percent. Thank you so much, Gilberto. So you know that I am so excited about Data as an Asset, I'm so excited about unified, repeatable, governed data and what that makes possible as people look at the same data sets to come to answers to their questions, and also how that enables the future of AI and machine learning.

Because you're going to get better answers when you have cleaner data that everyone understands in the same way.

What we've designed at Zone & Co is a data platform that gives you the capability to make that shift with flexibility and control over your data. Whether you are only looking to extract that data from NetSuite and have it in a raw way in storage, like in SharePoint or Azure Blob. We can make that happen.

If you're looking for something a little bit more complete, like those data sets that are ready to analyze, we make that available to you.

If you want more, you actually want the visualizations, you want the dashboards. That's our ZoneReporting offering, and we can make that happen for you either with our services or with you doing it yourself.

And lastly, we do provide for those of us who use Excel day in day out and want our NetSuite data in there. We provide that in Excel with full drill back to NetSuite and that one button refresh so you have all of those data options available to you.

Now today we are going to be focusing in mostly on ZoneReporting. And if you aren't already familiar with ZoneReporting, this is the tool that gives you full service insights from your NetSuite data in Power BI. That does mean that we're automating most of the work, so you save like 99% of the time spent preparing reports with that automatic refresh.

We provide you with over 350 connectors to data sources so that you can bring in additional sources that you're looking at. And very importantly, we give you 100% of your NetSuite transaction data that reconciles back to NetSuite with links back to NetSuite so you can check out any questions or examine any variances you have.

We've got over 300 customers who are using this today, and we're not going to go into a lot of detail on this at this point in time. But in case you were curious, we are going to be making available in the in the links, something that you can use to go ahead and take a look at ZoneReporting yourself. So if you want to go ahead and check out that link, you can explore ZoneReporting. One thing that I would highlight from that is you can go ahead and scroll down and check out those reports for yourself. You can drill in and examine some of those reports live. In Power BI on your own, so I'd encourage you to go ahead and do that.

Gilberto Diaz: Gilberto. Sure. So this is the link that Becca was referring to. Go in- there's a bunch of information out there. It'll give you the potential of everything you could do with the data being shaped and provided for you in a good way.

That's usually what we focus on during these webinars, but today's a little bit different. We're going to go into the Zone Data Portal and which is part of the Zone Data Platform. We're going to show you how to organize that data. So again, focusing on empowering you as a client. So let's give this a go.

Part of this journey to automate that is to give you control over your ETL pipeline. So that's when you extract, transform, and load or extract, load and transform depending on, on your flavor. All of that data into a way that it becomes an operational data source, right? So this is our UI on top of it.

Now, with the base architecture, which we, we could go through on another call, please contact me if you want to dig a little bit deeper, as long as you get your data into a raw data layer. All you have to do is go through a bit of configuration, which I'm going to show in a little bit, and transform that data into this unified architecture.

All right, so let, let's start by going through this ETL pipeline. This is a overview. This gives you an idea of all of the data refreshes and the processes underneath that take into account when refreshing data. So this is looking at processing files. We do a little bit of magic to scale up databases. Do those transformations, scale it down. And depending on your needs, whether you want just power BI data models to be refreshed or you want this data at your fingertips in your own warehouse we could also replicate that. So this is all part of this pipeline. So this is the overview.

This will give you a sense of what's coming up next. So when is my next refresh? You know, the next refresh for this is a demo environment we do at a 5:00 AM in the morning. And it gives you an idea of what's going on because this is a clean environment. There's really nothing here that has failed. But if so, this will give you the details so that you could fix it yourself. Again, the whole goal here is for you to be empowered. Some of these things could be like, Hey, there's a mismatch in your data model between what's being processed and what's expected. You'll go in there. It gives you the clarity. And you can go in there and address it. All right.

So how do you configure this thing right. How do you change these aspects? There's only three main points and all of this has been documented and there's training involved as well, but I. At that raw data layer, you go in and define what those files are that you want processed, right? And this definition looks something like this. You'll present a pattern, right? It could be whatever pattern you want. And again, to be clear, this deals with multi NetSuite instances Google, HubSpot, et cetera, all of that, as long as you get it into that layer. Will allow you to configure it to be picked up, configure that file name pattern, configure the data table that you want it processed into, and a couple of other details that would allow us to know how to process it.

So yeah, I'll just give you an example. Is this sort of a full data load or is this, you know, file the deal with deletes? How do we process that type of thing? Et cetera, et cetera. All these details are here. Once you've set that up. Then there's another step, another ETL step here that we call flow tasks. And these are just tasks that are grouped together based on what you're trying to do. So again, in the process files. This will go through all of the files that has been configured. It will ingest them in the order that you've set up.

Here it is a second part of that process, and then you map this. Don't worry about it. This might look complex, but we already have it primed for you. All you have to do is literally go into the file configuration and make those changes. All of this has been set up. You could look at the broader scheme of things if you want to. This data warehouse is set to refresh once a day. And these are the details here.

Well, there's a little bit more to it, isn't there? Right? Like what if I want custom fields? What if I want custom records? How do we work with that? Alright. Well, in the NetSuite perspective, our tool Tactical Connect is a no code, config-based solution that would allow you to just modify a saved search as you normally do today.

So you make that change, maybe you add that field, and it is as simple as going here through the schema and adding the field here, or adding a brand new schema here. That's it.

Once this is saved, as long as your files are already configured for the ETL processes, it would ingest it in. Do the necessary updates and transformations and then make it available for you in the data warehouse or in the Power BI data model.

And just to make a note, similar mentality and process around the views. So this is just something that we put together for our clients to make it easier for them to work with data. There's a couple of more things coming down the pipe, so we'll keep you posted. Again all around the realm of making working with data as easy as can be for you.

Alright, so these changes are there, you made these changes. How about deploying them? Right? Maybe it's you know, you might want to be careful with that. So we are finalizing the testing here around deployment, deploying these changes. And if you notice there's been a couple of changes that haven't been deployed in this environment.

This is a testing one that we're going to, you could go to the deploy. This will bring up the details. This would allow you to select what you want to override and deploy. Depending on whether the schema changes, views or configuration, you hit the deploy all button, and in the next process time, it will deploy those changes to your environments. And then you don't have to worry about it anymore unless you want to add different files, et cetera, fields, new schemas. It will automatically populate with it.

Now, you know, we've shown these reports. You could go in and dig deeper into those, what the reports are. But to be clear, when we empower you to look at the data, this is just like going to a SQL database interaction. So maybe a little bit of SQL might come in handy. Or you could have your own tools. That's the main key: own tools to go in and access the data. We do not limit you in any way. Tableau, Excel, power BI Google, whatever it is. I just spun up a silly Python script that connects to the SQL and it just allows me to browse all these things in a, in a easier way.

So that's it. That's really the overview. This is empowering you to control and automate your data. We have it in beta mode available to a subset of clients.

Becca, I probably missed some things.

Becca Byers: This, this was lovely. And I think it really shows all of the, the kind of capabilities, not all the ones we're going to have in the future, but so many capabilities that are allowing people to really manage their own data in their own environment and kind of also get it where they want it to go.

We've heard a lot from different customers kind of expressing why you built the data portal in the first place. And I just want to share one of those quotes. I believe the customer who said it is on this call, hello. But it says here, "ZoneReporting has done everything we needed it to do. Now we want to take it further by leveraging SQL as a part of Zone Data Warehouse, this gives us the ability to bring in external data sources, better understand our customers and market and structure reports exactly how we need them."

And this is something that we developed for our customers and based on your needs and that we've been beta-ing with customers. Right. Gilberto, you've had, you've had quite a few conversations so far, I believe.

Gilberto Diaz: Yeah, a lot of positive feedback.

It seems rather intuitive. They understand the flows, they understand the issues. So, so far so good. We're going to knock on wood and hopefully continue that trend as we start to extend more and more capabilities. This year is going to be exciting. There's a lot of things coming down the pipe and we're hope that you guys want to keep being informed of all these changes and benefit from these changes as well.

Becca Byers: A hundred percent. And I think one of the things that, that impressed me too is that we were hearing from our customers, not just from, from the analyst who I expected to hear from and who were saying this could have saved me like 10 months of building, but also hearing from VPs of sales and also hearing from private equity firms who were talking about ways that they could leverage this in their business operations.

Curious if there's any additional findings that you wanted to share from that.

Gilberto Diaz: Yeah, actually from the VP of sales it's interesting when we start off with all of these reports already, almost like pre-configured for them and then allow them to easily manage and change additional data sets that they just want to compliment right?

And that's the beauty of it. When we spoke with the VP of sales, not only was our insights magic, but they love the ability to create their own additional data sets and put them in the system you know, within the tool that we have. So it's really easy. On the on the PE side as well. Great feedback because they are looking at this automated pipeline to structure the data inflow. And then from there they're easily able to go through their portfolio of clients and just more or less rinse and repeat using the same architecture. So a lot of great things there.

Becca Byers: Amazing. And I do want to get to our questions, which is going to be our next section. But before we do that, I want to let you know that if you have any hesitation to kind of take the next step taking a closer look at any of the Zone Data Platform products, particularly ZoneReporting and Zone Data Warehouse.

Don't stop, get started today. We are offering this $999 offer just to make it a little bit easier for you to say yes to a demo. Checking this out and seeing if this is going to solve some of those ad hoc data problems for you and really move you in that strategic data direction. So we would love to talk to you if you are interested, and this offer is until April 31st, so I would encourage you to go ahead and check it out. You can use that QR code or go ahead and use the offer in the link down below.

Now let's get to some of the fun stuff. Hopefully some of you have some questions. So let's dive in to some of the questions we're seeing already. So the first one is one we should absolutely cover aloud, which is Gilberto. Can you tell us a little bit about where this data lives? If it's no longer living in NetSuite, where is it?

Gilberto Diaz: Yeah, great question. So we are a big fan of keeping this data within the client's environment. Really, it gives them full control to do whatever they want with the data. Some of our clients use it for auditing purposes et cetera.

This is, again, in the client's full control, but again, we help them set it all up. So if you don't have this expertise, our team of professionals are here to get you up and running and then give the full control back to you, especially with this Zone Data Portal that allows you to use a UI to manage that.

Becca Byers: A hundred percent. Thank you for, for explaining that for us. And another question that we often hear, what if I have data sources outside of NetSuite? What if I want to bring those in and blend them?

Gilberto Diaz: Yeah, that's a, that's a common pattern. So we have a whole bunch of environments set up already.

We do this every day. I'll just give you a quick example, whether it's from a system or perhaps you create your own budget files, et cetera, as long as you put it into that raw data layer, and we use Azure Blob storage for this framework, as long as you put it in there, that's what will allow you to configure the system to ingest that data.

And again, if it's an automated extract of an external system, that's what we work with our partners here for internally as Zone & Co. To get all that data extracted in automated fashion. Get all that data warehousing and ETL processing in place so you don't have to worry about it. Or if you want to do a manual thing, just put it into the same raw data layer and it'll be ingested.

Becca Byers: Fabulous. And then maybe just one or two more. What if I can't manage my own data and I don't have analysts on my team?

Gilberto Diaz: We still provide the full white glove service. So just contact us. We work with you to understand where you are in your journey. This part of the journey that we have is for those clients that have grown, right?

Maybe they now do have BI or data engineers. Maybe they now want to tweak those reports on their own. They got it now. Right. So it's really empowering them. But to be clear, again, we still provide our fully managed white glove service. So again, just contact our team, we'll tell you how it looks, we'll tell you, you know, how it gets set up, et cetera.

And then we'll take it from there.

Becca Byers: Yeah, a hundred percent. Thank you so much for spending some time with us learning a little bit about data strategy with us. I always love to pick Gilberto's Brain and learn what's up and coming in the world of NetSuite reporting and data solutions.

So thank you so much everyone.

Gilberto Diaz: Thanks all.

Becca Byers: Cheers.