Unlock Real-Time Business Insights with Heartbeat Metrics and Payroll Dashboards in NetSuite | ZonePayroll
In today's digital age, businesses need more than just data. They need real-time, actionable insights from that data in order to be able to make informed decisions. That's where NetSuite and ZonePayroll come in.
Tristan Day, General Manager at Zone & Co, coaches you through how Heartbeat Metrics in NetSuite provide a pulse on your business operations. Learn how to track key performance indicators and monitor vital processes.
Transcript:
In today's episode, we are talking about heartbeat metrics and dashboards leveraging the power of ZonePayroll. I am Tristan, your ERP coach. One of the key reasons for selecting NetSuite for most businesses is real time information and the ability to make better management decisions. And when you are looking at your dashboard in NetSuite, that is really the first place that we want to see the health of our business. We're gonna be focusing today on where that might be coming from your labor costs.
Payroll is often the, one if not of the top three costs to your business, and will often exist in a siloed system. So it's very difficult to try and put that into the same dataset to make the easily accessible information that we need. When it exists within NetSuite, we are able to to look at this information through a different lens. And where that might start is where we're looking at our heartbeat metrics. We're looking here at a sales heartbeat.
And what we're looking for from a particular heartbeat is a value where if it's above or below a certain threshold, we know we're winning or losing the game. And when it comes to data, even the best number that you can't get at is completely useless. But in NetSuite, we can get to most, if not all of the numbers that we need. And as we look at here for this month or this quarter or the same month last year, we've got green flags showing up against all of the different periods that we're reporting on apart from the last financial year. And all of this information is based on the number of sales orders booked And the payroll cost.
So this is effectively the multiplier that your sales team is bringing to your business, this month, they've generated nearly 18 times more or so in bookings than they have incurred in payroll costs. This is a great improvement from the last financial year where they were only bringing in two and a half times their payroll costs. Similarly, if you're in an Inventory business, then you want to be looking at the cost per item of inventory that perhaps has gone through your warehouse. So we're looking at the number of items sold versus the non-sales payroll costs. And today, we're gonna look at how we can build these scorecards and build these metrics using NetSuite saved searches, so that on a regular basis, this information is being updated, and you're gonna be able to access really detailed, accurate information as a consequence of something you've got to do anyway.
So today, we're gonna look at how we build this heartbeat metrics KPI scorecard. These can be created using the classic center by going to the customization tab, center tabs, KPI scorecards, and new. And in doing so, you've then got your scorecard. Do strongly recommend that you pay attention to putting in a proper ID for particular scorecard, give it a name, give it a description, and then we're gonna start building out the searches that we're using to reference the information that is in the scorecard. So we're gonna start with our payroll costs.
The payroll costs are run from a pay slip search using the ZonePayroll product. And by having this information in the system, we're able to filter to the sales department. We can put all of the costs that we want to include in this particular formula, and we must make sure we sum it, and we must also put a date filter in the saved search. KPI Scorecards can be configured to do periods instead. And in that instance, you would need to put a period filter in here. But for the purposes of today, we're using a date filter.
Once that has been saved, then we can go into the KPI Scorecard. We can go to custom KPI Number 1, we can select sales payroll costs. To create the non-sales payroll cost was a very straightforward process. All we did, we went to the sales payroll cost. We gave it a different name.
We changed the department of here to be none of those, and we also exclude our executive department. And then we hover over the green arrow, and we click save as. And then you can come back into the scale into the scorecard, and you can add that down in Custom KPI number 4. We can also then go to transactions. So in this instance, I want to go just to my sales orders, and I just want to sum the amount net of tax.
Again, I've given it a date filter and I've saved it, and I've put that in to my sales orders. And finally, for my items sold, for my dispatch heartbeat, I've gone in and I've only picked up items that are an inventory item, and of course This criteria will inevitably be different for your business even in similar industries. And in this instance, I'm just summing up the number of quantity in the transaction line to give me the number of items that have been processed in that particular month, period, etcetera. And by putting the date filters in here, then the scorecard itself will filter down to those date ranges. Once they have all been added into our custom KPIs, then we can come in to the KPIs -tap here.
I do need to add the KPI 1 and 2 in here, and then I'm gonna hide it because I don't need to see the number in the Scorecard. I want these heartbeat metrics literally just to be the fractions that I'm looking at. Although, of course, as you can see, if it suits you and if it is your preference, so you can do this differently because I've also got my performance indicators up here that I can actually go and look at as well. And by doing so, I can actually have to compare to 1. I can actually do a formula as I've done down here to do a division, and these are my dispatch I'll be on my sales partners. The date ranges that I've configured for my scorecard are, you know, this month, same month, last fiscal year, this fiscal quarter, etcetera. And, again, depending on what your data tells you and how you run your business, then these would be set in the accordingly.
And then what we've done in the scorecard is we've said, that's great. We want to see if anything is below 3 as it in the last financial year, I want you to flag it as a red flag. But if it's above 3.5, we can put a green flag. Similarly, if we want to amend these here as well, or we want this dispatch heartbeat, and we want that to be, you know, less than, magnitude, greater than, and the different options in here, we can do that. We might only want to do it on a specific date range.
And, of course, you can choose are different images, text colors, background colors, make them bold, etcetera. And then when we have that in the scorecard, we have the information and the factions that we have here. And what we've then done is we've built the associated data, if we need to go look at it, into the key performance indicators. And these can then be again, added to depending on what your heartbeats are. If you need to say, actually, I wanna run My business look at this on a monthly basis.
I want to look at it on a quarterly basis. I want to look at it on a weekly basis. And the weekly This is an interesting period to run-in because, of course, if you are running your payroll on a weekly basis, and that's the data that we're splicing with the The sales order's in here, then you'll actually have that information there on a weekly basis. If you're running it monthly, obviously, then the monthly period is the way to go. This gives us real time information and the ability to see the health of our business and to react much quicker to things that might be happening.
If we know that our dispatch heartbeat has jumped up to 4000 pounds per item dispatched or has fallen below a certain rate, then that really can give us a route and a focus to go and see where the issues may lie and fix them before they compound into something more. So we've looked at our key performance indicators, and we've looked at our heartbeat metrics. But when we are looking at payroll and we're looking at the systems in general that does also look at how many times we're having to do corrections. So if we're running a standard payroll and We've got, you know, a hundred and 77 payslips that we've run but we've not run any adjustments. That means that we're also doing things accurately. And this goes towards the health and wellness of your staff.
Payroll is something that helps people pay their mortgages. So we want to make sure that we're getting it as accurate as we possibly can. The ability to have this across your jurisdictions, particularly in those that we support and combined with your own capabilities to save searches, perhaps you're using ZoneReporting and pulling it out into Power BI. This gives you an advantage over anybody else that has payroll in a siloed system. Thanks for watching this video.
We hope it was useful. If you want to find out more, please visit zoneandco.com.
