Introduction

The ability to create and manage complex custom financial reports enables NetSuite administrators to tailor reports to meet specific business needs and also reduces the time and effort required during the reporting process.

In this blog post, we’ll focus on the building and customization of NetSuite financial reports. We’ll cover the building of custom layouts, look at custom sections and rows, and then move on to the creation of custom calculations. Finally, we'll wrap up by looking at the balance sheet equity section and learn when we should customize it and when we shouldn't.

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Custom Layouts

In NetSuite, you have the ability to create custom report layouts for the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement. In this post, we’ll focus on the customization of the balance sheet. However, the concepts that we will cover can be applied to all three reports. Let's jump into NetSuite and create a custom layout.

From the consolidated balance sheet, click on the Customize button at the bottom. We're taken to the Financial Report Builder, and we are on the Edit Layout tab. The first thing that you'll want to do to create a custom layout is navigate to the layout field, scroll down to the bottom, and select one of the standard layouts.

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For now, let's pick the standard balance sheet layout for the US and click on the Edit Layout button. We’ll give our layout a name that makes sense to us, e.g.Test Balance Sheet Layout 1. Notice that the name you use will now appear in the Layout field.

Now, let’s customize this report layout. Keeping it simple, we can add a text row to the top of the balance sheet report and enter the text “Test Balance Sheet Layout 1”.

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After clicking on Save you will notice that the report will refresh and now include the text that we added at the top of the report.

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In this example we have the subsidiary context field value set to “Consolidated”, but if we were to run this for our Canadian entity, you’ll notice that the text we added at the top is no longer there. That's because the custom layout we created has not yet been applied to the Canadian entity.

One important point that I want to make relates to the NetSuite custom layouts and how they apply to the different NetSuite editions. By default, NetSuite will create custom layouts in the system for each of the editions that NetSuite offers for the key countries and the general edition XX. The key countries are Australia, Canada, Japan, the UK, and the United States. As such, when you're creating custom layouts, you need to make sure you understand which entities they should be applied to.  You may have a US GAAP specific report that applies to your US entities, but not your international entities. For consistency, you may want to apply your custom layouts to all subsidiaries, but it depends upon your reporting requirements.

In NetSuite, let’s create a custom layout for an Australian entity. The first thing we'll do is filter our custom balance sheet to our Australian entity and refresh. You’ll notice that the layout we created is not applied, so click on Return to Customization. The reason the layout was not applied is because, by default, NetSuite will apply the standard layout for Australia with it being one of the key NetSuite editions. Let's go ahead and change the Layout value to the Test Balance Sheet Layout 1 that we created previously.

If we scroll up, we’ll see we have received an error message. This is because we need to make some updates to this report. We can do that by clicking on Edit Layout and duplicating the layout—so you’ll want to go through this process after you have completed your financial report layout and are ready to roll it out to other subsidiaries and apply it to those entities. Let's keep the name as Test Balance Sheet Layout 1, but we'll add AU for Australia.

After duplicating the layout, we still have the same error message that we need to address, but now we can actually modify the report layout. This error is specific to the equity section of the balance sheet. Let’s go to the net income section and add the row reference back in. That value gets wiped because we're taking a report layout for the United States and applying it to a different country—in this case, Australia. We’ll set that to net profit and loss, and come down to net income and do the same thing.

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Scroll up to the top and notice that the error message has now gone. You'll need to do this in some cases, but it will depend upon the entity that you're working with. Nonetheless, if you see that big red ribbon at the top of the financial report, you typically will need to modify the equity section of the report. Hit save, and now we’ve run our report for the Australian subsidiary. You’ll also see that the custom text we applied to the original report layout now appears here.

The final thing that I want to call out for custom layouts is that you can actually confirm which subsidiaries are using a specific custom layout. You can do that by navigating to Reports > Financial > Row Layout Assignment. Once you've been taken to that screen, you then have a number of filters available to you, one including the row layout. We'll find the name of the row layout that we created, and it will show you the list of subsidiaries that are using that layout.

From Reports, go to Financial, scroll all the way to the bottom to our Row Layout Assignment, and click on that. From this screen, you'll get the complete list of custom reports you have in your financial system with all of the various subsidiaries as well as the row layouts. The quickest way to find the ones we care about is going to the Row Layout drop down. If you recall, the name of our layouts began with “test”, so we’ll search first for Test Balance Sheet Layout 1.

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When we click on that, we’ll see that we only applied this layout to our consolidated entity and no other entities. If we now go to our test balance sheet layout for Australia, we've confirmed that layout has been applied to our Australian entity.

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Custom Sections and Rows

Let's move on to custom sections and rows. In NetSuite, you are able to customize your financial reports by adding sections and rows. One way to do that is to add header and summary rows to your report, which will typically be used to group other sections and rows of your report together (and often you’ll sum them).

The next customization option is to add a financial section to your report. That's typically used to group a number of GL accounts together and set them up in a section that is distinct from other areas of your report.

You can also add a financial row to your report. It's similar to the header and summary row section, and you can add a formula there as well. In this case, it does not include the header section.

Adding a text row to your report is very handy when it comes to customizing the layout of your report. You can add specific text to the header or footer of your report, and you can even add a blank row to separate your report so it's more easily digestible.

Lastly, you can add a reference row to your report. This will let you source data from other financial reports and pull that into the report that you're customizing. For example, you may be working on a balance sheet report and you want to pull in some information from the income statement, so you would add a reference row to achieve that. Let's jump into NetSuite now to see how each of these custom sections and rows can be leveraged.

Below is our standard balance sheet report. To add new rows and sections to our report, we’ll navigate to the top left and click on the drop down menu. At the top of the report, we’ll add a header and summary row section.

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Now, we’ll give this a name. Assuming we want to capture our total assets less current liabilities, we’ll name it accordingly: Assets Plus Current Liabilities. We'll also use that for the summary label.

To pull the correct numbers, we need to add a custom formula. Make sure you click on the radio button for “apply a formula”. In this case, we’ll select a row within our report and use “total assets”. We're going to add to our total assets another row in our report, being our total current liabilities.

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When we run this report, we’ll now have a new section at the top which will include the calculation of total assets, less current liabilities. We can see here that when we add the two together we get $88,000,000.

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The next custom layout change you can make is adding a financial section. You can either use an existing one or create a new section; typically, you're going to create a new section to meet your custom reporting needs. The great thing about this section is that you can add specific GL accounts, so if I'm looking for specific account numbers I want to include here, I can add them one by one. We want to make sure that we use the “Use Expressions” feature and leverage parentheses in conjunction with “and/or” accordingly. It's pretty straightforward—just think about how you would use a saved search.

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It is straightforward to add a custom formula row. Custom formulas are very similar to the header and summary rows, but in this case you just add the formula section.

Now, let's take a look at a text row. If you want to move it down instead of having it at the top, you can do so by clicking on the down arrow, but it may take a few seconds (and sometimes dragging is a little easier). Additionally, you can add any text here, but you can also keep it blank. In that case, you'll see that NetSuite converts that to a blank row.

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You can add multiple blank rows, if you wish, and separate your report as necessary. If we collapse, you can see what it looks like if we insert four blank rows between our assets and liabilities.

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Obviously, this doesn't look great, but hopefully you get the point that you are able to customize the report layout by adding blank rows, which can be helpful.

Another customization option is to add a reference row. I mentioned earlier that you’re able to pull in values to your report from other reports. We're looking at a custom balance sheet here, so let's say we want to pull in some specific details from our income statement. We’ll pick the report that we care about, and then we’ll pick the specific row from that report. For example, perhaps we want to pull in our gross profit.

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It’s very important that you select the appropriate range. Typically, you want to pull in the start date and end date for your report where that's applicable to achieve the correct financial results, so test these to ensure you have the correct range for your reporting needs. After previewing this and collapsing our report, we can see that our new reference row has appeared in our report.

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Right now the balance is zero, but depending upon the report that you're pulling from and the row that you're pulling from, the number will display here appropriately. What you'll find is that you really have endless possibilities when it comes to customizing your financial reports in NetSuite.

Let's now look at a specific use case where perhaps you have an asset account that has a negative balance, and you need to move that to your liability section. Returning to customization, let's come to our other assets section and edit the criteria. It’ll give us a warning, but that's fine.

Once here, we know that we have a GL account within our other assets that has a negative balance, so we need to move it to our other liabilities section. We’ll use expressions and tell NetSuite to pull in all accounts with an account type of “other asset”. We will specifically exclude the GL account that we want to move to liabilities, so we're going to say “is not account number X”. In this case, the account number that we want to exclude is 1910. Remember also that the best practice is to include parentheses.

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Going into our other current liabilities section, we’ll do the opposite. We’ll edit criteria, use expressions, and use “include account number is 1910”. We need to make sure this is the OR function—it’s any of our existing current liabilities OR account 1910.

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We’ll now preview our report. Notice that we have no other assets at this point because we've removed them. If we expand our liabilities, under Other Current Liabilities we will now see account 1910, which wasn't there previously.

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You can do this with any of your GL accounts. You have full reign over the GL accounts that appear in particular sections of your report. Note this is not only limited to GL accounts—you can filter your reports based on class, department, location, any of those reporting segments within NetSuite.

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Custom calculations

Let's take a closer look at custom calculations in our NetSuite financial reports.

Custom calculations can be applied throughout our NetSuite financial statements. They can either be added as simple metrics as rows to our reports, or we can add columns to the reports that perform calculations. We're going to look at a use case shortly, where we can add the gross margin to our income statement. Since we can add columns to the report, we’ll also take a look at an example where we can add a comparative period to our income statement and then a third column to look at the percentage change between the two accounting periods.

From our consolidated income statement for the period January 2023, we want to look at our gross profit margin. So, we’ll customize our report and add a line below our gross profit. We’ll click on the row below, add a formula row, and label this formula row as our gross margin.

Now, let's go down to the formula section. It needs to start with our gross profit for the period. Then, we need to divide that by our total income for the period. In this case, in our income statement we have two separate rows for our income, so we need to combine the two. That means we're going to divide by our combined income. Here, we have income and we need to add to that “other income”. Once we have gross profit divided by income, we’ll put that in a percentage format. This is the formula we'll use to generate the gross margin in our income statement.

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Let’s jump across to edit columns to add a comparative period and a third column to show the percentage change between the two accounting periods. First, we’ll add a second amount column. The first amount column will be the current period and the second column will be the prior period. In order to set this up as the prior period, we'll need to go down to the Alternate Period Range Type and set it to Relative to Report Date, and then select the alternate period range. In this case, we're looking for “period filter” and then “last period”.

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Once we have our current period and our prior period, we’ll compare the two by adding a formula field as an extra column to this report. We’ll then look at the percentage change from this period to last period. So, we’ll take the percentage of Y, in this case, comparing our new period to our old period—X being the amount for our current period, Y being the amount from our prior period.

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After our gross margin has been added to the report, we’ll have a column for our prior period and a column for the percentage change. Let’s go ahead and preview.

What we see here is that we have a column for our current period (being January 2023), the prior period (being December 2022), a column for the percentage change between those two accounting periods, and a row for the gross margin.

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I want to point out that the gross margin is not in the correct format for our amount and our prior period amount. Let's customize this so we're not showing the dollar value, and instead we show a percentage value. There are different ways to do this, but we can force the behavior that we're looking for by unchecking the Show Currency checkbox and adding a suffix of percentage.

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Now when we preview the report, we'll see it's correctly displaying the gross margin with the percentage symbol and no longer showing the dollar symbol.

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Custom Balance Sheet Equity Section

This particular area of the balance sheet should generally not be modified. Let's explore why.

This section includes custom formulas that are linked to other financial reports, such as the income statement. If you start modifying the accounting period ranges that are selected in the report, you can end up with a balance sheet that does not balance because your retained earnings may be inaccurate, as well as your net income.

Here we have a custom balance sheet report, and we're in the financial report builder. Let’s scroll down to our equity section and retained earnings. We can see below that, in this case, our retained earnings is pulling from our retained earnings GL account.

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If we look at net income, however, we can see that this is related to the income statement.

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If you recall earlier, we added a custom reference row, which is what this is. Here we are referencing the net income row of the income statement, and we have the relative range of the balance brought forward to the beginning of the year. This is to get the correct opening equity position.

If we navigate to the net income line, that also references the income statement and the net income row, but this time the net income from the beginning of the year to the end date of the report.

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As you can imagine, if you start to modify these, you can end up in a situation where your balance sheet no longer balances. To show that, let’s change the relative range to Balance Forward, then preview.

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As we can see, just by making one simple change to the equity section of a custom balance sheet, we have now completely thrown off our balance sheet and it's inaccurate. This is why it’s important to use caution when modifying that section of a custom balance sheet.

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Summary

In this post, we learned how to create custom financial report layouts and how they apply to different NetSuite editions.

We also looked at how to customize these financial report layouts by adding things like custom sections, custom rows, and calculations. Finally, we wrapped up by confirming the importance of the balance sheet equity section and noting that, generally speaking, we should not modify that section unless it's absolutely necessary. If you do decide to modify it, you should definitely check that your balance sheet still balances after the fact.