Quick Hits: Financial Reporting

Are you ready to take your NetSuite financial reporting to the next level with PowerBI? This 15-minute virtual session will empower you to enhance accuracy and streamline your reporting processes effortlessly.

Led by ZoneReporting expert, Jim Doyle, this session will cover how ZoneReporting can:

• Simplify complex financial data
• Automate reporting workflows
• And help you gain actionable insights for better decision-making

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Transcript

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Hi everybody. Thank you for joining today's session on ZoneReporting, which is our app that enables Power BI reporting for NetSuite. Quick introduction to myself. My name is Jim Doyle. I'm a solution consultant here at Zone & Co. My background is heavy on the NetSuite side - I'm actually a certified NetSuite admin, ERP consultant, and have spent five years in the ecosystem, including time working for NetSuite directly as a functional consultant.

ZoneReporting Overview

So today I want to spend most of my time giving you a live demo, but I wanted to start with a minute or two on the challenges that we're addressing and the benefits that we provide. So these are the common reporting challenges that ZoneReporting was built to help NetSuite clients overcome.

First is limited flexibility. It can be difficult in NetSuite to define complex business logic for calculating metrics the specific way you need them. On top of that, NetSuite's single level join structure can restrict your ability to pull together all the different records and transactions required to drive those calculations. This also contributes then to silos of information, whether that's across subsidiaries or departments that are maybe using NetSuite differently, or even from a systems perspective. If you're not able to integrate data from all your different applications, it's going to be very difficult to get a holistic view of your business.

And then we also hear pretty frequently that reports aren't actionable. You know most ERPs are capable of saved searches, saved reports, maybe some basic pivot tables and bar charts, but ERPs aren't purpose-built for analytics. So you don't have those advanced features to uncover the kind of insight that can really drive your strategic decision-making and support day-to-day operations as well.

And then finally, manual work. We talk to a lot of NetSuite clients who spend hours every month manually building reports in Excel. It's inefficient, error prone, it's not really scalable. And you end up spending time and resources maintaining reports instead of on activity that can be more directly beneficial to the business.

So these are the challenges that our founder set out to solve when he built ZoneReporting and that's exactly what we do. We replicate your NetSuite data in Power BI, reconcile it to the penny. That means that we're now able to use an industry leading BI and analytics tool, Power BI, to report against data from our best in breed ERP, NetSuite. That opens the door to all sorts of time saving automations. We've got advanced analytics for actionable answers to real business questions, plus the ability to integrate data from all our systems, not just NetSuite, and all within a single enterprise wide reporting platform that you can use across all your departments.

Live Demo

Let's take a look in action. I'm currently logged into Power BI. That's what you're seeing on my screen right now. I'm logged into the web version. You can also use the desktop version, but just like NetSuite all I need is a browser. I've got all my Power BI menus and settings here, and then my pre-built reports on the left. Think of these like templates, these are configurable. So you can configure them, we can customize them, or you can even build your own reports from scratch.

So starting with our financial overview. This is a good example of a report that, you know, we used to hear all the time that "I can't get a view of the business like this until the end of the month," someone has to update it or build it. So we provide this out of the box so you can see your top 10 customers, items and classes, some metrics around units sold, revenue, gross margin, trended income statement. And if I click on any of my classes or my customers or my items, it's going to filter the page. So now I can get that view of my key influencers and monitor the business.

And you can always adjust the segments that we're analyzing here. Maybe instead of looking at classes, you've got a custom segment that you're using that you'd want to see here instead.

We can also help with top level analysis of volume, revenue, COGS, margin. Here we have our volume and revenue analysis. This is a good example of how you can get all the data working together on one page and make it actionable.

So typically when you're doing this type of analysis, you've got multiple reports. You've got 10 pages of reports and you're trying to find correlations between all those pages. Whereas here, we get everything on one page and it's dynamic. So I can see, OK for all of our classes, for all of our items, our average revenue per unit is $677. Well, down here, I can see that we're selling a ton of this card product class. I want to learn a little more about it. So I'm going to click it and it's going to filter my page. So now we're able to see for just that card product class, we're above average revenue per unit. So high value class, we've got a consistent value trend. I already know that we can sell a ton of because we are, so we can support the volume. But down here, I can see immediately that we're barely selling into our top 20 customers. So this could be a great upsell or cross-sell opportunity. And that is actionable insight that you can really only derive when, again, you get everything working together on one page versus having information overload from countless reports that you're going through.

When it comes to your key segments, we can help you analyze those. Here are some of the key segment analysis reports that we provide, but you can also create your own. Here, if we're looking at customer as a key segment, I can see profitability data for all my customers, groups of customers, or if I click on a single customer, I get that instant customer level profitability, monthly P&L data, units sold and gross margins. So, a good way to look at my least and most profitable segment values in this case, that being customer.

And then we can also do a 360 analysis. Here, again, we're looking at customers and I can see units sold, gross margin. We've got year over year, we've got trended and comparative analysis, that time intelligence built out. So you can look at comparisons or you can look at trends as we see here in these visualizations. And again, I'm able to see this information for all my customers, groups of customers, or if I click on Bird Books again, get that instant customer level view. This is basically our entire history with Bird Books all on one page.

And I can drill into these as well. So because we're bringing in 100% of your NetSuite transactions at the line level, I can hover over, in this case, our revenue for January for Bird Books, total revenue $387,000. Well, let's see the transaction lines. I can drill through and this is going to return the transaction lines from NetSuite that are summing to that 387,000 revenue amount. So here is the math, so to speak.

This ensures that we're also reconciling again back to NetSuite. We can run an income statement in NetSuite and in Power BI, and it's gonna tie out to the penny because we're building it from the same transaction line detail in both systems. And we've got drillable links back to the transaction in NetSuite as well.

And then we can also help with other kind of department level reporting for things like accounts receivable. Here's a dashboard showing us some of these key metrics, DSO, turnover, 30-, 60-, 90-mix. Same idea for our accounts payable. You can get some of these metrics out of NetSuite, but it can be difficult to get them all consolidated on a single dashboard. And then also the visualization aspect that we provide here in Power BI.

And then moving into financial reports like income statements, balance sheets, you know, NetSuite's native financial report builder can be a little bit static. It can be hard to create these different views of your reports that you want. Most NetSuite clients are doing Excel gymnastics. They're exporting to Excel and doing those manual adjustments, manual reformatting every month. And it takes hours and hours. And then even when you build the report, you know, as soon as you send it out, you're dealing with old data.

What we want to do is get those formats built here in Power BI where we have that flexibility and then it's automated anytime you need it and it's going to be updated throughout the month. Here's an example of a very specific kind of managerial view of an income statement analysis where we're looking at full dollar percent rev, dollar per unit, and we're looking versus previous month trailing 12 months. So we've got some time intelligence in there. You really couldn't build a view like this in NetSuite natively, but we can build it in Power BI and now again, it's automated.

So here's another example, a couple more examples, of just these different formats. Here we're looking at a class comparison as well as our year over year, all the way to just that plain vanilla income statement. But again, because we're in Power BI, we have a lot more flexibility to customize it.

And then last but not least, we can also help with budget versus actual reporting. We'll set you up with a budget template in a spreadsheet that allows you to load in as many different versions of your budgets and your forecasts as you want. I can now toggle between those and compare them against my actuals from NetSuite.

So here, if I'm looking at this report, that budget is coming from that spreadsheet template with my budget data versus actuals from NetSuite so we can get that variance. So Power BI is also a great tool for combining data sources, not just NetSuite data, but even non-NetSuite data from applications, or in this case, a spreadsheet.

Takeaways

So that hopefully gives you a sense, just a quick sense, of the art of the possible when it comes to what we can provide.

I would say that the key takeaways would be more flexible reporting. We have unlimited joins in Power BI, and then we also have measures that we can use to define very specific ways that you want to calculate your business metrics. That's a really powerful tool in and of itself.

It'll be a single platform that you can use across all your departments because we're bringing in financial data. We're also bringing in your operational data plus any data that's relevant to reporting from any other systems that your business may be using.

And then the automation component. We don't want you doing manual work in Excel, trying to get these distributed, built and then sent out. Let's automate that whole process through Power BI and now you can focus on value-add activity to the business.

So thank you for tuning in today. For more information here, you can see our website.