Introduction

When NetSuite Administrators are asked to “build a report in NetSuite” the vast majority of the time they are being asked to create a Saved Search. Saved Searches allow NetSuite users to quickly and easily get to the data they need to manage their business processes.

Users are able to reference most (not all) fields on a given object when reporting on them in a Saved Search. NetSuite has predefined joins available as well to pull in data from related objects into a single Saved Search. For example if you built a transaction saved search to report on sales orders and wanted to pull in additional details about the customer for each sales order you can do this by referencing the related tables in the saved search menu. Related tables are at the bottom of each dropdown menu and represented by an ellipsis.

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Screenshot of a Saved Search showing the ability to add “Customer Fields” from the customer related table

Did you know?: If you’re working with multiple currencies you might be reporting the wrong amounts in your NetSuite Saved Searches? Double check your settings to make sure the “Consolidated Exchange Rate” field is set appropriately.

Importance of Creating Saved Searches

Saved Searches are an essential tool in any NetSuite Administrator’s toolkit. They can be run for most NetSuite system objects - think entity records, transactions records, item records, etc.

Taking that a step further, they arm NetSuite Teams with the tools necessary to answer common (and uncommon) business requests:

• How many sales orders did we close last month?
• How many customers have a shipping address in WA state?
• What was the largest purchase order we created with a particular vendor in the last 12 months?
• Who approved journal entries in the system during the last quarter?

The list goes on.

Salto Tip: You can run a Saved Search on Saved Searches! Use this functionality to identify obsolete Saved Searches that can be deactivated or identify users who are creating the most ad-hoc Saved Searches - your power users.

They are also the foundation for many other NetSuite customizations. As you start planning to customize NetSuite with new Saved Searches here are a few use cases where they can be leveraged:

Dashboard Portlets

You can have the results of a Saved Search be displayed on end user dashboards with just a few clicks. After building your Saved Search and validating the results are complete and accurate, customize the settings to check the “Available as Dashboard View” check box.

Screenshot of NetSuite Saved Search customization options

Now that the Saved Search is available as a dashboard, navigate to your home page to personalize it with a new “Custom Search”.

Screenshot showing the ability to add the results of a custom Saved Search to your dashboard

Workflow Parameters

NetSuite workflows can be leveraged to automate business processes in a low/no code manner. To extend these solutions, you are able to reference the results of a Saved Search to determine which records the custom workflow will execute against. You can do this for a workflow executed on the trigger of a specific event “Event Based”.

Screenshot showing where to set a Saved Search as a condition for an event based custom workflow

You can also do this for a workflow that is scheduled to be run on a consistent frequency.

Screenshot showing where to set a Saved Search as a condition for a scheduled custom workflow

Scheduled Script Parameters

Similar to workflows, Suitescripts and their associated script deployments can be customized to reference a specific Saved Search. The Saved Search ID can be hard coded within the script itself, or better yet captured as a separate parameter that references the Saved Search ID. This is especially useful when working with scheduled scripts and map/reduce scripts.

For more information on Saved Searches see the NetSuite documentation here.

NetSuite continues to innovate across all key areas of the platform. Let’s explore some of the latest enhancements to these features in 2024.

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New NetSuite Features

With the 2024.2 release, NetSuite made a few updates on specific saved search functionality.

Users now have the ability to use custom fields when using the price book saved search. Specifically, these custom fields are now available under the criteria, results, filters and price book dropdown menus.

Users also have the ability to filter by price book in a subscription search.

In addition, some changes were made to SuitePeople. Benefits tracking links that were previously located under Reports > Benefits no longer exist. Instead, they can now be found under Reports > Saved Searches. Additional details on this update to SuitePeople can be found here.

Link to the 2024.2 NetSuite Release Notes in SuiteAnswers.

Note: NetSuite account access is required to access these Release Notes.

Challenges with Managing Customization Manually

Managing saved searches between different NetSuite environments can be difficult, especially when attempting to recreate them manually in your Production environment.

Saved Searches have many different features and settings. If just one criteria, formula or field is different in some way it can have a significant impact on the saved search results. When creating a more complex Saved Search that includes conditional logic in the criteria tab, the consequence of inadvertently setting “AND” instead of “OR” and vice versa can have a huge impact on the results. If this is missed and your business starts to rely on the results to manage their business processes this could impact your customers, vendors, partners, employees and more depending upon the scenario. With the smallest difference having the potential to make a huge impact, the inherent risk in migrating Saved Searches manually is just too HIGH.

Another scenario to consider is when a Saved Search is part of a larger NetSuite customization that involves scripts or workflows. With the interdependency between these customizations, the migration process can be challenging for even the best NetSuite Administrators when asked to complete this process manually. This can be a point of frustration for the NetSuite Admin Team, because the migration process itself does not add a lot of value, but can take a very long time in the event that they run into dependency issues between the two NetSuite environments (source and target - generally the Sandbox and Production environments.

Combining those two scenarios, if a Saved Search is part of a scheduled script solution and the list of records in the Saved Search far exceeds expectations, you could find yourself scrambling to modify Saved Search criteria at the last second to manually halt a script deployment that is executing on records that it shouldn’t be executing on. This is why it is incredibly important to double check your Saved Search results before deploying a solution in Production to make sure they are in line with your expectations.

Not sure how impactful this is to your business? Check out the cost of getting deployments wrong (with a calculator) here.

Now, let’s explore solutions to these challenges.

Solutions for Managing NetSuite Customizations

As we have seen, managing the migration of Saved Searches between different environments can be a painstaking process, especially when doing this manually by recreating the Saved Search, field by field, criteria by criteria, in Production.

The inherent risk of doing this manually is HIGH, just given the volume of customization options available in any one Saved Search and even more so if that Saved Search is tied to a larger NetSuite customization.

With NetSuite Teams managing the migration of solutions on a frequent basis, NetSuite has some out of the box solutions available to manage them. Depending on the customization you are looking to migrate you might leverage features such as “Copy to Account”, “SuiteBundler” and “SuiteCloud Development Framework” more commonly referred to as “SDF”.

Each of these tools have pros and cons, so you should review and see which will be the most effective for your given customization. It is not a one size fits all decision.

That said, there are alternative solutions to consider to help manage your NetSuite deployments across two or more NetSuite environments. One solution to review is Salto - you can get more information on the Salto SuiteApp here. The Salto platform allows NetSuite Administrators to easily perform environment comparisons across the environments your company manages. This significantly simplifies the process of identifying potential deployment dependencies. In fact it allows the NetSuite Admin Team to find and address any potential conflicts in advance of deployment, so that the deployment to Production is seamless.

In addition, the Salto platform provides the ability to execute rollbacks in the event a deployment needs to be reversed, whether it was pushed inadvertently or issues were found in Production that need to be resolved ASAP. Rollbacks should not happen often (hopefully) but when they do there is generally a sense of urgency around them. Having a tool at your disposal to manage this process quickly and efficiently is a game changer when in those moments.

Now that you have successfully deployed your NetSuite Saved Searches to Production, let’s consider some best practices in this area.

Best Practices When Working With NetSuite Saved Searches

1. Keep it simple - Minimize the use of complex formulas to enhance performance and ability to maintain easily. While powerful, formulas should be leveraged when required not as a standard.
2. Use consistent naming conventions - This will facilitate search identification and retrieval. This is especially crucial when multiple users create and manage searches, which is the case for most NetSuite environments.
3. Utilize summary functions - Condense and organize your data by providing a more concise overview. Be aware that summary data may not be suitable for dashboard notifications, as zero results can be displayed even if underlying data exists.
4. Leverage system notes - Doing so will allow you to gain deeper insights into record creation and modification history. To avoid excessive results, use summary functions (grouping, maximum, minimum) to condense the information.
5. Suite Analytics Datasets and Workbooks - A great alternative to saved searches when specific fields are unavailable. Datasets offer greater flexibility in data access and configuration. They allow for deeper level joins across tables and access to fields not natively available in a saved search.
6. Automate saved search migrations - Streamline the deployment of NetSuite saved searches between environments. Manual migration is time-consuming and prone to errors. Utilize the tools at your disposal to ensure a seamless and reliable migration that takes into account any related dependencies.
7. Specify timeframes - Especially when executing NetSuite transaction searches. Neglecting this can lead to inaccurate results due to the application of consolidated exchange rates to the current period, rather than the transaction period.
8. Apply standard filtering criteria - Depending upon the saved search type there will be a core set of criteria to apply, such as "Posted" and "Not Memorized" for transaction saved searches. This ensures alignment with general ledger data, which only includes posted transactions.
9. Review security settings - Prior to sharing a search, carefully review its security settings to restrict access to authorized users. Security settings can be found under the "Results" and "Audience" subtabs.
10. Optimize search efficiency - Do this by limiting the data scope and result columns to essential information only. This will reduce processing time and improve overall performance.

Salto Tip: Check out this FREE NetSuite Administrator training course on Salto Leap for a detailed review of NetSuite Saved Searches.

Useful references

• NetSuite Saved Search Mistakes
• NetSuite Saved Search Documentation
• NetSuite Saved Search Examples
• 2024.2 NetSuite Release Notes

For more Best Practices to manage your NetSuite customizations, check out Salto’s blog posts that explore some of the things that NetSuite Developers and NetSuite Administrators should be leveraging within the NetSuite ecosystem.

Final thoughts

NetSuite Saved Searches are nothing short of indispensable. They help to solve problems in the short term through quick data extracts and in the long term by combining with other NetSuite customizations such as end user dashboards, workflows and scripts.

With Saved Searches being so widely used, often without restriction, NetSuite environments can run into performance issues with thousands of them, many of which are obsolete. Worse yet, if many of these Saved Searches are scheduled to run it can have an impact on system performance for your end users. Take the time to clean up your Saved Searches periodically, including a review of those on schedule vs those with a high system impact - these are the ones with a large number of columns, criteria and those with complex formulas embedded.

Whether you are managing NetSuite reporting centrally or allowing your end users to create their own, lean on the best practices outlined in this article to help keep your Saved Searches simple and more importantly producing the correct results.

If you’re a NetSuite Administrator make sure you are taking advantage of the tools available to you to manage your Saved Searches seamlessly and if you’re not already using Suite Analytics datasets and workbooks it might be time to start exploring those as alternatives to Saved Searches.