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ChatGPT, a sophisticated language model developed by OpenAI, has emerged as a game-changing technology that has the potential to transform the way businesses operate. With its ability to generate human-like responses to natural language queries, ChatGPT has a wide range of use cases in various industries, including the NetSuite ecosystem. By leveraging ChatGPT's advanced natural language processing capabilities, NetSuite administrators can streamline their operations and automate routine tasks.

In this article, we will explore some of the most compelling use cases of ChatGPT in the administrative context and how it can help improve your overall efficiency and productivity. For each use case, results will be presented alongside the prompt so you can try it yourself and hopefully create something unique and valuable for your business.

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Using ChatGPT for SuiteAnalytics queries

As the first use case, we’ll examine the SuiteQL capabilities of ChatGPT. The results require considerable improvement, but they can still potentially reduce your working time when creating new queries. 

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Prompt: 

Write a NetSuite SuiteQL query that exports the fields tranid, trandate, and entity from the Transaction table. Left join the transactionline table as tl  and the transactionaccountingline table as tal (on tl.transaction = tal.transaction) to source also the account, amount  fields. The query shall filter only transactions that are created for a specific entity.

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Even though I’ve spent some time sharpening this prompt and it does work, in order to create one like it you should be familiar enough with SuiteQL to write your own query.

Let’s try another one.

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Prompt:

Write a NetSuite SuiteQL query to retrieve all journal entry transactions that have the 'allocation source' or 'allocation destination' text in the memo field on the journal line.

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This is pretty good— and that’s without specifying the SuiteQL structure! All that’s left to do here is change the journalentry and journalentryline tables to transaction and transactionline respectively.

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Using ChatGPT to write SuiteScripts

Another interesting use case is generating simple SuiteScripts rapidly. In simple use cases, this can actually reduce your workload, but you’ll have to examine the code closely. 

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Prompt:

Write a SuiteScript Client Script that will pop up a UI dialog if a transaction line start date and end date have less than a year between.

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This is pretty impressive! The code works as expected on the first try—you just have to adjust the field scriptids to your environment.

However, you should remember to treat ChatGPT SuiteScripts as unfinished materials. I’ve seen more than several cases where the use case was a bit tricky and required a workaround. In those instances, the ChatGPT SuiteScript invented new modules to resolve the challenge.

I believe that if you are writing a small or simple piece of code, this can save you some time. When dealing with system edge challenges, ChatGPT can help you think of more ideas, but you’ll have to further develop them so they work in the NetSuite environment.

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Using ChatGPT to write an advanced PDF/HTML template

If ChatGPT could write new PDF templates from scratch that would be amazing. It’s not there yet, but you can generate a simple template and improve it with further prompts. Copying an existing template for further enhancement is not that appealing; it will force you to extract batch after batch of the code, which can get very tedious and you may find yourself fixing a lot of syntax errors in the end. 

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Prompt: 

Write an Advanced HTML/PDF NetSuite Form to print invoices. The advanced HTML/PDF template uses the freemarker library to extract data from the printed record. The template shall be enclosed within pdf tags instead of html and start with the tag : <?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE pdf PUBLIC "-//big.faceless.org//report" "report-1.1.dtd">

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Though it is a very simple invoice print template, you can improve it in a session of several prompts. This template works on the first try, so you can adjust it further according to your needs.

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Using ChatGPT to write an email template

Another compelling use case is creating email templates, as these templates are less user friendly then the advanced templates.

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Prompt:

Write a NetSuite email template to a customer acknowledging an upcoming payment to be made. The email template uses the freemarker library. Wrap all the fields in the following way: <#if record.field??>record.field<#else>if not</#if>.  Use <br/> tags to avoid long lines and avoid <#assign> tags

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This one requires some more work.

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Prompt:

Replace the recipient.email with record.entity and wrap it with the <#if field??>field</#if> tag

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ChatGPT insists on writing some odd things in the template, but  it can still save you some time generating the whole template from scratch. You can always fine tune it to your use case.

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To Summarize

ChatGPT offers various ways in which administrators can leverage the power of AI to improve their productivity and streamline their tasks in NetSuite. At the moment, it seems this tool is capable of generating code for simple use cases. The most successful use cases are simple SuiteScripts and SuiteQL queries, while advanced HTML/PDF templates and email templates produce less accurate results and require even more modifications. It seems there wasn’t enough training data for the model on the NetSuite system, compared (for example) to the results for Salesforce use cases. 

I believe that with proper training of the model we can generate more accurate results—for example, feeding the SuiteQL table structure to the model before asking for a specific query. This is currently out of the scope of this article, but the experiment could be interesting.