Introduction

All roads lead to financial reporting in NetSuite. All business process customizations, custom forms, custom workflows, custom scripts, etc. ultimately lead to financial reporting at the end of the period.

It is important to get these customizations right in order to produce complete and accurate financial results for your company. It is equally important to customize your financial reports to meet both internal reporting requirements as well as those externally.

NetSuite provides many customization options for financial reporting, that allow you to future proof them as changes are made to the chart of accounts and other reporting segmentation in the future.

Did you know?: You can create your own custom sections in financial reports to include calculations for things like gross margin, net margin, EBITDA, etc. You can also create financial reports from scratch, which can be helpful if you need to structure the financial data in support for a financial statement footnote or for a specific audit requirement.

Importance of Creating Custom Financial Reports

NetSuite has numerous out of the box reports available to you. Income Statements, Balance Sheets and Cash Flow Statements provided in standard layouts for each NetSuite Edition.

Did you know?: NetSuite offers multiple Editions based upon the designated country of a given Subsidiary record. For example, a US-based subsidiary will automatically use the US NetSuite Edition. A Japan-based subsidiary will automatically use the Japan NetSuite Edition. This applies to Australia, Canada and the UK as well. All other countries are collectively grouped under the XX NetSuite Edition.

As part of these NetSuite Editions, different financial statement layouts are provided with the purpose of being compliant for the specific region the Edition supports. If you run a standard income statement for the US you will see that it differs from a standard income statement for the UK.

Screenshot of Standard Income Statement Layout (US)

Screenshot of Standard Income Statement Layout (UK)

The differences may be subtle and the financial results exactly the same in terms of the bottom line, however the point remains that different companies operating in different countries have different financial reporting requirements. As such, it is important that you take the time to customize your NetSuite financial reports to ensure they are compliant for the country you plan to file your financial statements with (external stakeholders).

Internal stakeholders may have different financial reporting requirements. Perhaps instead of breaking down expenditure by category your stakeholders need to see expenditure broken down by department e.g. Sales & Marketing vs Research & Development vs General & Administrative, etc.

Regardless of the financial reporting requirements, you need an application that is flexible to meet the needs of both internal and external stakeholders.

As you start planning to customize NetSuite with new custom Financial Reports here are a few considerations:

Additional Columns

First, there is more than one way to add additional columns to your report. When you customize a financial report and navigate to the “Edit Columns” tab you can add columns from the available field menu on the left hand side.

Salto Tip: You can also add a formula field that will allow you to perform some simple mathematical calculations on numbers existing in other columns. This is a great way to automatically calculate variances period over period, both absolute and percentage change.

Screenshot showing the ability to add a formula field and set the appropriate formula type

Another way to add columns to the output of your report is to modify the “Column” value after executing the report. Depending upon the report type, many values are available such as Subsidiary, Department and Accounting Period. The report will default to “Total”, producing a single column for the “Amount” field. However if the report is set to run by subsidiary, you will now see a column for every subsidiary, including a column for the total across all subsidiaries. The same holds true for other reporting segments.

Additional Sections

If you need to add a custom section to your report you can do so by customizing the report and navigating to the “Edit Layout” tab. Here you are able to add a new financial section to your report. As you do this, be conscious of the fact that the standard financial reports are already setup to balance, so any additional sections added must be excluded from totals such as Net Income in the case of an Income Statement. You may opt to add an informational section at the bottom of your income statement that provides some greater detail on revenue.

Screenshot showing how to add a new financial section to an existing financial statement report layout

Salto Tip: You can add a “Text Row” and leave the text blank in order to insert a blank row in the financial report. In fact, when you remove the default text you will see that the row is updated to “<Blank Row>” on the left hand side.

Section Criteria

Within each section of a standard financial report is the ability to “Edit Criteria”. Criteria generally defaults to a very broad categorization, such as the account type. If you click on the “Edit Criteria” button you have the ability to manipulate the logic for that particular section to filter on account numbers, departments, locations and other reporting segments.

This functionality allows you to break down expenditure by department. You would first need to create a new section as we saw previously, then set the criteria to filter on the specific department(s) to be reported on under that particular section.

Screenshot showing where you can modify the criteria for a given financial report section

For more information on Standard Financial Reports 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.

New NetSuite Features

Generally speaking, more recent NetSuite releases include updates to reporting in the area of tax i.e. new tax reports and accounting for new tax requirements on a country by country basis. The 2024.2 release was no different.

One of the key changes from a financial report perspective relates to financial reports for Brazil. More specifically, if you have the full Multi-Book Accounting feature enabled in your account, you can now select the accounting book from which to generate the standard financial reports for Brazil. This includes:

• Balance Sheet
• General Ledger
• Income Statement
• Trial Balance

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

Building custom NetSuite financial reports takes time. Especially when managing custom criteria for each report section. Attempting to replicate the report from one environment to another can take a very long time depending upon the amount of customization. Further, the potential impact of getting just one setting or criteria slightly wrong could be massive.

If you have created a custom section in your financial report (a common request) and the criteria references specific departments and/or GL accounts, by missing just one of these multi-select criteria options the financial statements provided to key stakeholders could be wildly inaccurate. In the worst case, business decisions could be made based upon the inaccurate results that stemmed from a manual migration from one NetSuite environment to another.

Another scenario could be the setting up of a tax-specific report to execute on the wrong basis - accrual vs cash basis. This setting is not used very often, so can easily be missed as part of a manual migration process. The result would be remitting the wrong amount of tax to the relevant tax jurisdictions. Further, the reconciliation process to unwind what has been paid vs outstanding after the fact (once the error is eventually caught) is not for the faint hearted!

To mitigate some of the risk of human error, some NetSuite Administrators will perform additional checks and balances to ensure everything has been migrated completely and accurately. Sometimes this will involve having multiple members of the NetSuite Team on a call to oversee the process, so now not only is the development process time-consuming, but the deployment process is even more time consuming when the NetSuite Admin Team could (really should) be focused on other value-add initiatives.

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

Managing custom financial reports across NetSuite environments can be challenging. Doing it manually is not only a time intensive process, but results in a HIGH level of risk given the large number of configuration settings on any one financial report.

There are some out of the box solutions available to you to manage the migration process for financial reports in NetSuite. These native solutions include Copy to Account, Suitebundler and SuiteCloud Development Framework (SDF). Note that not all of these solutions will work for all cases. For example there is no option to “Copy to Account” for custom financial reports and users have reported mixed success with the alternatives. You should take the time to review these options to consider which might be best for the given customization you are looking to migrate from one NetSuite environment to another.

This is a consistent challenge for NetSuite Admin teams who manage multiple NetSuite environments. With all of the active development work in flight and dependencies to consider, NetSuite Administrators are exploring alternative solutions. One solution is Salto. You can see more details about the Salto SuiteApp here. This SuiteApp is helping NetSuite teams in numerous ways. It allows you to perform environment comparisons across all of your environments, which makes it much simpler to identify any deployment conflicts prior to making the push to Production. In other words it is allowing the team responsible for these migrations to be proactive in their approach vs reactive.

In addition, Salto gives NetSuite Administrators the flexibility to execute deployment rollbacks quickly and seamlessly. Rollbacks are generally a top priority when they need to occur and having the tools available to manage this process in a matter of minutes is a huge asset for any NetSuite Admin Team.

Now that you have successfully deployed your custom financial reports to Production, let’s consider some best practices in this area.

Best Practices When Working With NetSuite Financial Reports

1. Schedule your reports - You can have reports scheduled to be emailed on any given day/time. Why log into NetSuite and wait for your report to generate when you can have it ready at the top of your inbox before you start your day?
2. Consider system performance - Building reports with large volumes of data, such as including many columns and then running by subsidiary or accounting period, will impact system performance. Run large reports off peak hours or better yet see #1 above.
3. Consider ongoing maintenance - When customizing your financial reports try and keep any custom criteria to a minimum. To the extent custom criteria is needed think through how this can be future proof i.e. does not need to be modified every time a new department or GL account is added to your NetSuite environment.
4. Use cash basis reports when needed - Certain NetSuite reports allow you to run them on a cash basis. This is especially helpful if you report taxes in the US on a cash basis for particular States. Make sure you have the right report configuration based upon your reporting basis.
5. Income Statement by department - As part of your period close process run your income statement by department to identify any transactions with missing department values. Do the same thing for other reporting segments such as Class.
6. Blank rows - Add blank rows to clean up report formatting.
7. Dynamic reporting dates #1 -  Leverage dynamic reporting dates within custom columns to report on prior periods e.g. last rolling 12 months.
8. Dynamic reporting dates #2 - Leverage dynamic reporting dates to run comparisons across financial periods e.g. this quarter vs last quarter.
9. Validate accuracy - When modifying the standard income statement, double check your bottom line still ties out to the standard income statement before finalizing. If not the net income/loss doesn’ match up then something is wrong with your custom report.
10. Remove drill down capabilities - Remove drill down capabilities within the “Edit Layout” section if you want to avoid hidden rows when exporting your report to Excel. Note this will also remove the ability to drill down into numbers directly within NetSuite.

Salto Tip: Check out this FREE NetSuite Administrator training course on Salto Leap for a detailed review of NetSuite Financial data and reports, including how to build complex custom financial reports.

Useful references

• Report Customization
• Scheduling a Report
• Example Report Format Changes
• 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 financial reports allow NetSuite Administrators to report on their business to meet the requirements of both internal and external stakeholders. When building custom reports consider both system performance and ongoing maintenance needed to ensure you are not building reports that will either take a very long time to run or produce incorrect data for your end users (if not maintained).

While customizing the financial reports in NetSuite might take some getting used to, it can be an invaluable tool by providing business insights on a real time basis. A user simply needs to hit refresh on the report to see the latest and greatest financial data for the company. With the ability to calculate custom metrics and highlight key variances, the financial reports can help support important business decisions.

There are some valuable pre-packaged reports available in the SuiteApp marketplace and SuiteBundler. Make sure to check out the International Tax Reports Bundle (bundle ID 43003) if you report taxes globally - it is free and has close to 30,000 installs across all NetSuite environments. There are also many localization options available depending upon the countries your business operates in.

If you’re a NetSuite Administrator make sure you are taking advantage of the tools available to you to manage your Financial Reports seamlessly.