As your business grows, manual processes that once worked can become significant obstacles. Tasks like data entry, invoicing, and generating reports consume valuable time and introduce the risk of human error, which can lead to inaccurate financial reporting and poor decision-making. NetSuite's powerful automation capabilities offer a solution, allowing businesses to streamline operations, enhance accuracy, and free up teams to focus on strategic growth.
This post will explore five key NetSuite automations that can transform your financial management. By implementing these features, you can save significant time, reduce costly errors, and gain more reliable insights into your business performance.
1. Automate Your Procure-to-Pay Process
The procure-to-pay (P2P) cycle involves every step from creating a purchase order to making the final vendor payment. A manual P2P process is often slow and prone to errors, involving paperwork, lengthy approval chains, and manual data entry.
How NetSuite Automation Helps
NetSuite automates the entire P2P workflow. You can set up rules to automatically generate purchase orders when inventory levels drop below a certain threshold. Once a PO is created, it can be routed electronically for approval based on predefined rules, such as dollar amount or department.
When your business receives a vendor bill, NetSuite's system can match it against the corresponding purchase order and receipt of goods. This three-way matching process ensures you only pay for what you ordered and received. Finally, you can schedule and process vendor payments automatically, ensuring bills are paid on time while optimizing cash flow.
Scenario: A mid-sized retail company constantly struggles with stockouts of popular items and late payments to suppliers. By automating its P2P cycle in NetSuite, purchase orders are automatically created and approved when inventory hits a reorder point. Vendor bills are matched and paid on a set schedule, improving supplier relationships and ensuring products are always available for customers.
2. Streamline the Order-to-Cash Cycle
The order-to-cash (O2C) cycle is the lifeblood of your revenue stream. It covers everything from a customer placing an order to you receiving payment. Manual O2C processes can lead to shipping delays, incorrect invoices, and difficulties in collecting payments, which directly impact cash flow and customer satisfaction.
How NetSuite Automation Helps
NetSuite provides an end-to-end solution for automating the O2C cycle. When a customer places an order, the system can automatically check inventory availability and trigger the fulfillment process. Once the order is shipped, NetSuite generates and sends the invoice to the customer without manual intervention.
The system also automates revenue recognition according to accounting standards like ASC 606, which is critical for businesses with subscription models or complex contracts. Furthermore, you can set up automated reminders for overdue invoices, reducing the manual effort required for collections and accelerating cash flow.
Scenario: A software-as-a-service (SaaS) company manages hundreds of monthly subscriptions. Manually invoicing each customer and tracking payments is a massive drain on resources. With NetSuite, the company automates its recurring billing, revenue recognition, and payment collection processes. This not only saves the accounting team dozens of hours each month but also provides a clearer, more accurate picture of monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
3. Simplify Financial Close and Reporting
The month-end close is a notoriously stressful time for many accounting teams. It involves reconciling accounts, posting journal entries, and generating financial statements—all under a tight deadline. Manual closing processes increase the likelihood of errors and can delay the delivery of critical financial reports to leadership.
How NetSuite Automation Helps
NetSuite's financial management capabilities include features designed to automate and accelerate the financial close. You can schedule recurring journal entries for expenses like rent and depreciation. The system's bank reconciliation feature can automatically match transactions from your bank statements with entries in your general ledger, flagging any discrepancies for review.
NetSuite also offers a period close checklist, which guides your team through the necessary steps and prevents new transactions from being posted to a closed period. Once the period is closed, you can automatically generate standard financial reports, such as the Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement, with just a few clicks.
Scenario: A growing professional services firm used to spend the first week of every month manually closing the books. By implementing NetSuite's automated journal entries and bank reconciliation, they cut their close time from five days to just two. Management now receives accurate financial reports sooner, allowing for more agile and informed decision-making.
4. Enhance Expense Management and Reimbursement
Managing employee expenses can be a cumbersome and inefficient process. Employees have to save receipts, manually fill out expense reports, and wait for approvals and reimbursements. For the accounting team, this means chasing down missing information and manually entering data into the accounting system.
How NetSuite Automation Helps
NetSuite’s expense management automation simplifies the entire process. Employees can submit expense reports directly through the platform, even from a mobile device, and attach digital copies of their receipts. You can configure custom approval workflows to automatically route reports to the correct manager based on department or amount.
Once an expense report is approved, the system automatically creates the necessary journal entries and schedules the reimbursement for the next payment run. This creates a seamless, paperless process that saves time for everyone involved and provides greater visibility into company spending.
5. Automate Fixed Asset Management
Tracking and managing fixed assets—from purchase to depreciation to disposal—is a complex task. Manual tracking using spreadsheets is not only time-consuming but also highly susceptible to errors, which can result in inaccurate financial statements and non-compliance with tax regulations.
How NetSuite Automation Helps
The NetSuite Fixed Assets Management module automates the entire asset lifecycle. When you acquire a new asset, the system can automatically create an asset record from the purchase transaction. You can configure NetSuite to calculate depreciation automatically using various methods (e.g., straight-line, declining balance) and post the corresponding journal entries each month.
When an asset is sold or retired, the system calculates any gain or loss and generates the final journal entries. This automation ensures that your fixed asset records are always up-to-date and accurate, simplifying audits and tax preparation.
Empower Your Business with Automation
Manual processes are a bottleneck for growing businesses. They consume time, create opportunities for error, and limit your ability to make strategic, data-driven decisions. By leveraging NetSuite's powerful automation features, you can build more scalable and efficient financial operations. Automating key processes like procure-to-pay, order-to-cash, and financial close allows your team to shift its focus from tedious data entry to high-value activities that drive business growth.
