NetSuite supports your financial reporting, inventory, order management, purchasing, and other business operations. As your company grows, your system changes with it. New users join, workflows evolve, integrations expand, and customizations accumulate. Over time, settings that once worked well may no longer support the way your team operates.
An annual NetSuite health check gives you an opportunity to review these changes before they create larger problems. You can identify security gaps, inaccurate financial data, underperforming scripts, unreliable integrations, unused features, and manual workarounds that add unnecessary work to your team’s day.
The goal is to understand whether your NetSuite environment remains secure, accurate, reliable, and aligned with your current business requirements. Your internal team can review day-to-day issues, while experienced NetSuite consultants can help investigate technical problems, assess configuration risks, and recommend improvements.
Use this 20-point checklist to guide your annual review. Each item explains what you should examine, the warning signs to look for, and the questions your team should be able to answer.
NetSuite Health Check Checklist: 20 Areas to Review
Use this checklist to identify what needs correction, prioritize the issues by business impact, and turn the findings into a practical remediation plan. A good review should confirm root causes, test the affected processes end to end, and recommend changes that improve accuracy, adoption, and scalability
1. Review Your Chart of Accounts and Subsidiary Structure
Your chart of accounts (CoA) and subsidiary structure affect how your company records transactions, consolidates financial results, and reports business performance. As your organization adds products, locations, legal entities, or reporting requirements, the original setup no longer reflects how the business operates.
Review your accounts for duplicate entries, inconsistent naming, inactive accounts that remain in use, and accounts that no longer serve a clear reporting purpose. If your company operates multiple subsidiaries, confirm that the structure supports your current legal entities, intercompany activity, currency requirements, and consolidated reporting.
Ask your finance team whether they regularly export NetSuite data to spreadsheets to reorganize accounts or combine figures manually. Those workarounds could indicate that your reporting structure needs attention.
Your annual checklist:
- Confirm that your chart of accounts reflects your current financial reporting requirements.
- Review duplicate, inactive, or inconsistently named accounts.
- Verify that subsidiary relationships and intercompany configurations reflect your current organization.
- Ask your finance team whether account mapping or consolidation requires recurring manual adjustments.
2. Validate Transaction Accuracy and Master Data
Reliable reporting depends on accurate data entering NetSuite. Duplicate customers, outdated vendor records, incorrect item details, inconsistent units of measure, and incomplete transaction fields can affect purchasing, fulfillment, invoicing, and financial reporting.
Work with your finance, sales, procurement, and operations teams to identify recurring data-entry problems. Review customer and vendor records, item records, pricing details, payment terms, tax settings, and other fields that influence downstream transactions.
Look beyond individual errors. If your team repeatedly corrects the same fields, maintains parallel spreadsheets, or re-enters information from another system, investigate the source of the problem. It could involve unclear ownership, integration mapping, record permissions, or validation rules.
Your annual checklist:
- Review duplicate or outdated customer, vendor, and item records.
- Confirm that critical master-data fields are complete and consistent.
- Investigate recurring transaction corrections and data-entry errors.
- Identify manual data transfers or spreadsheet-based workarounds that could be reduced through better configuration or integration.
3. Review Accounting Periods and Financial Controls
Accounting period settings influence when transactions are recorded and which users can make changes to completed periods. If period management is inconsistent, your finance team could face unexpected adjustments, delayed closes, or questions about the accuracy of previously reported results.
Ask your finance team how reliably it closes each period and whether late journals, unexpected changes to prior-period transactions, or repeated reconciliation issues delay the process. Review period-close procedures, posting permissions, journal-entry approvals, and controls around reopening closed periods.
A health check should also examine whether your month-end process depends on a few employees who understand undocumented steps. If key tasks require manual intervention every month, your team should document the process and determine whether appropriate system controls could reduce the effort.
Your annual checklist:
- Review accounting-period controls and permissions to reopen closed periods.
- Examine recurring late adjustments, posting errors, and close delays.
- Confirm that journal entries and other sensitive transactions follow the required approval process.
- Document recurring manual steps and determine whether system controls need improvement.
4. Verify Tax and Compliance Configurations
Tax and compliance requirements change as your company enters new markets, adds subsidiaries, changes products, or updates its operating model. Your NetSuite configuration needs to reflect the rules applicable to your transactions and jurisdictions.
Review tax codes, tax schedules, nexus-related settings where applicable, exemption records, and the way tax information moves between NetSuite and connected systems. Confirm that your team understands which settings are maintained internally and which depend on an external tax engine or specialist.
Your finance team should investigate unexplained tax differences, missing exemption information, inconsistent tax calculations, and recurring adjustments made before filing. These issues deserve attention because they can affect transaction accuracy and create additional work during reporting periods.
Your annual checklist:
- Confirm that tax settings reflect your current jurisdictions, subsidiaries, and transaction types.
- Review tax-code assignments, exemption records, and relevant integration settings.
- Investigate recurring differences between NetSuite tax records and filed or reconciled figures.
- Confirm who owns tax configuration updates and how changes are reviewed and tested.
5. Review User Accounts and Role Assignments
Your workforce changes over time. Employees change departments, contractors finish projects, and responsibilities shift between finance, sales, operations, and administration. If NetSuite access is not reviewed regularly, users could retain permissions they no longer need.
Ask your IT and NetSuite administrators to compare active user accounts against your current employee and contractor lists. Review inactive accounts, shared logins, temporary access, and users whose roles no longer match their responsibilities.
Pay particular attention to highly privileged roles. A user who needs to enter transactions does not necessarily need access to system configuration, sensitive financial information, or user administration. Your access model should give employees the permissions required for their jobs without granting unnecessary control.
Your annual checklist:
- Compare active NetSuite accounts with your current workforce and contractor records.
- Remove or update access for departed employees and users whose responsibilities have changed.
- Review administrator and other highly privileged accounts.
- Confirm that each role provides the access required for the user’s current responsibilities.
6. Examine Segregation of Duties and Approval Authority
Approvals and role restrictions help your company control financial transactions and reduce the risk of unauthorized activity. However, approval structures can become outdated as teams reorganize or employees take on additional responsibilities.
Review who creates, approves, modifies, and pays transactions such as vendor bills, purchase orders, expense reports, journal entries, and customer credits. The appropriate separation depends on your business processes and control requirements, but sensitive activities should not rely on unrestricted access or informal verbal approval.
Your finance leaders should also examine whether approval requests regularly bypass established workflows because the assigned approver is unavailable, the approval limit is outdated, or a transaction becomes stuck in the process. These patterns can reveal weaknesses in your controls and workflow configuration.
Your annual checklist:
- Review role permissions for sensitive financial and operational activities.
- Confirm that approval limits reflect current job responsibilities and authorization policies.
- Investigate transactions that bypass required approvals or rely on manual exceptions.
- Review recurring approval delays and determine whether routing rules need updating.
7. Review Authentication and Administrator Security
Access reviews should include how users sign in and how your team protects privileged accounts. Strong authentication controls reduce the risk of unauthorized access, particularly for administrators and users who handle sensitive business information.
Ask your IT team to review the authentication controls available in your NetSuite environment, including multifactor authentication requirements where applicable, single sign-on configuration, password-related policies, and access for external service providers. Confirm that administrator accounts have appropriate safeguards and that emergency access arrangements are documented.
If several employees share administrator credentials or your team cannot identify who owns an integration or service account, investigate before the next review cycle. Shared or poorly documented access makes it harder to establish accountability when a configuration changes or an unexpected transaction occurs.
Your annual checklist:
- Review authentication requirements for users with access to sensitive data and administrative functions.
- Confirm that administrator access is limited, protected, and assigned to accountable individuals.
- Identify shared, dormant, or unexplained service accounts.
- Document access ownership and the process for granting, reviewing, and revoking privileged access.
8. Assess SuiteScript Customizations
SuiteScript supports business-specific requirements that standard NetSuite functionality does not address. Over time, however, scripts can become difficult to maintain, particularly when developers leave, business processes change, or several scripts affect the same transaction.
Your NetSuite experts should review the scripts deployed in your account, their purpose, their owners, and the business processes they support. Look for scripts that repeatedly generate errors, run longer than expected, consume significant governance resources, or depend on fields and records that have changed.
Pay particular attention to customizations that nobody on your current team can explain. An unfamiliar script is not automatically a problem, but running it without understanding its purpose, dependencies, or failure behavior creates unnecessary risk. Your review should establish which scripts remain necessary, which require testing or optimization, and which are candidates for retirement.
Your annual checklist:
- Inventory deployed scripts and document their purpose, owner, and dependencies.
- Investigate recurring script errors, execution delays, and governance-related failures.
- Identify scripts that depend on outdated fields, records, or business processes.
- Confirm that important customizations have an accountable owner and appropriate testing procedures.
9. Evaluate Workflows and Approval Automation
Workflows automate actions such as transaction approvals, record updates, notifications, and status changes. When business requirements change, existing workflows might continue to apply outdated conditions or duplicate functionality handled elsewhere.
Ask your team to walk through important processes from start to finish. Confirm that each workflow triggers under the correct conditions, assigns work to the right users, and produces the expected result. Review workflows that run alongside SuiteScript or other automation, as overlapping logic can cause conflicting updates, duplicate notifications, or unexpected transaction behavior.
Your employees’ experiences are useful evidence here. If they regularly ask an administrator to correct a status, manually send an approval reminder, or update a record because an automated step failed, investigate the underlying rule rather than treating each incident as an isolated mistake.
Your annual checklist:
- Review active workflows against current business requirements.
- Identify overlapping workflows, scripts, and other automation that affect the same records.
- Investigate failed approvals, incorrect status changes, and recurring manual corrections.
- Test important workflows with representative transactions and document expected outcomes.
10. Validate Saved Searches, Reports, and Dashboards
Your teams rely on saved searches, reports, and dashboards to monitor performance and make operational decisions. If their filters, formulas, joins, or access permissions are outdated, users could receive incomplete or misleading results without realizing it.
Review the reports used for financial close, inventory management, order fulfillment, purchasing, and management reporting. Compare selected results with underlying transactions or other validated records. Confirm that date ranges, subsidiary restrictions, status filters, and calculations still reflect the questions your business needs to answer.
Also ask employees which reports they actually use and which ones they export into spreadsheets for further analysis. An outdated dashboard or a report that requires repeated manual cleanup can indicate that the underlying reporting setup needs attention.
Your annual checklist:
- Validate the accuracy of business-critical reports and saved searches.
- Review filters, formulas, subsidiary restrictions, and role-based visibility.
- Identify duplicate, obsolete, or unused searches and dashboards.
- Ask report users where they still rely on spreadsheets or manual calculations to obtain reliable figures.
11. Investigate System Performance Problems
Slow pages, delayed searches, timeouts, and unresponsive dashboards can interrupt everyday work. If these issues become more frequent, your team should determine whether the cause involves inefficient searches, scripts, workflows, integrations, transaction volumes, or other account-specific factors.
Start by documenting where users experience delays and when they occur. A report that runs slowly during month-end close presents a different operational concern from a single page that loads slowly for one user. Your NetSuite administrators and technical experts should examine error logs, script execution details, search complexity, and relevant integration activity to narrow down the cause.
Avoid treating every performance complaint as a reason to redesign the entire system. The objective is to identify the source, understand its impact, and prioritize fixes that improve the processes your employees depend on most.
Your annual checklist:
- Ask employees which pages, searches, reports, and transactions take unusually long to complete.
- Record recurring timeouts, failed operations, and periods of degraded performance.
- Investigate scripts, workflows, searches, and integrations associated with those delays.
- Prioritize performance fixes according to business impact and the frequency of the problem.
12. Confirm Customization Documentation and Ownership
Your NetSuite account might contain custom fields, records, forms, scripts, workflows, reports, and integrations created by different consultants or internal developers. Without reliable documentation, even a routine change becomes harder to assess because your team cannot easily determine which processes depend on the affected component.
Review whether your organization has an up-to-date inventory of important customizations and their owners. Documentation should explain the business purpose, dependencies, expected behavior, testing requirements, and the person responsible for maintaining each critical component.
If your current administrators cannot explain why a customization exists, your team should investigate its function before modifying or removing it. Unfamiliar customizations are particularly important to review when the original developer has left, errors have appeared after a release, or several components depend on the same custom field.
Your annual checklist:
- Confirm that critical customizations have current documentation and assigned owners.
- Identify components that depend on former employees, contractors, or unavailable developers.
- Review undocumented custom fields, scripts, workflows, and integrations before changing them.
- Record dependencies and testing requirements for future maintenance and system updates.
13. Test Integration Reliability and Data Synchronization
Your NetSuite environment might exchange information with ecommerce platforms, CRM systems, warehouse management applications, payment providers, tax tools, or other business applications. An integration that appears connected can still transfer incomplete, delayed, duplicated, or incorrectly mapped data.
Review integration logs and exception reports with the people responsible for each connection. Confirm that important records, such as sales orders, customers, inventory quantities, fulfillment updates, invoices, and payments, move between systems as expected. Pay attention to failed synchronization jobs, recurring manual reprocessing, duplicate records, and differences between source and destination systems.
Your review should also establish what happens when an integration fails. If employees discover failures only after a customer order is delayed, or a financial reconciliation does not balance, your team needs better monitoring, clearer ownership, or more reliable exception handling.
Your annual checklist:
- Review the status, error logs, and recent failures of business-critical integrations.
- Reconcile selected records between NetSuite and connected systems.
- Investigate duplicate transactions, missing updates, delayed synchronization, and recurring manual reprocessing.
- Confirm that alerts, recovery procedures, and integration ownership are clearly defined.
14. Prepare for NetSuite Releases and Test Customizations
NetSuite updates can affect the behavior of scripts, workflows, integrations, reports, and other account components. Your team should prepare for each release rather than waiting for an employee to report that a familiar process no longer works.
Identify the business processes that depend on customizations or integrations, then prioritize testing around financial transactions, order processing, fulfillment, reporting, and other critical operations. Use an appropriate testing environment, such as a sandbox where available, to validate representative scenarios before deploying related changes to production.
If your team has experienced unexpected errors after a release, investigate whether the affected components were tested and whether their dependencies were documented. A lack of release testing is particularly risky when several customizations interact or when the person who developed them is no longer available.
Your annual checklist:
- Review upcoming and recent release changes relevant to your account.
- Identify critical customizations, integrations, and workflows that require regression testing.
- Document test scenarios and expected results for essential business processes.
- Investigate post-release errors and confirm that corrective actions are tested before production deployment.
15. Review Audit Trails and Transaction Controls
Audit trails help your organization understand who changed a record, when a change occurred, and what information was affected, subject to the relevant record type and available tracking features. They are particularly important when investigating unexpected financial adjustments, unauthorized changes, or discrepancies between business records.
Ask your finance and compliance teams which records require closer monitoring and whether the available audit history supports their investigation needs. Review changes to sensitive records, important configuration settings, approval-related information, and transactions where accountability is essential.
Your team should also confirm that the right people know how to locate and interpret relevant audit information. If investigating an adjustment requires reconstructing events from email conversations and spreadsheets because the system history is difficult to access or insufficient, review the applicable tracking settings and supporting procedures.
Your annual checklist:
- Confirm that audit history and tracking are appropriate for critical records and business controls.
- Review selected changes to sensitive financial, operational, and configuration records.
- Verify that your team knows how to investigate unexpected changes and transaction discrepancies.
- Document any gaps in audit visibility and determine whether configuration or process changes are required.
16. Examine Reconciliation Results and Compliance Findings
Reconciliation helps confirm that records across financial accounts, operational processes, and connected systems agree. Repeated discrepancies deserve attention because they can point to inaccurate data, integration failures, incorrect account mapping, or gaps in transaction controls.
Review bank and account reconciliations, inventory differences, intercompany balances, and other reconciliations relevant to your business. Look for unresolved items that carry over from one period to the next, recurring adjustments, and differences that employees repeatedly correct manually.
Your finance or compliance team should also revisit findings from previous audits and internal reviews. If a corrective action remains open year after year, establish why it has not been completed and whether the underlying issue affects reporting accuracy, regulatory obligations, or operational control.
Your annual checklist:
- Review recurring reconciliation differences across relevant financial and operational records.
- Investigate unresolved items that carry over between reporting periods.
- Revisit previous audit findings, control exceptions, and corrective actions.
- Assign ownership and deadlines for outstanding issues, with evidence that completed fixes resolve the original problem.
17. Confirm That NetSuite Still Matches Your Business Processes
A NetSuite configuration that worked well when your company first implemented the system might no longer support current operations. New approval requirements, additional warehouses, revised fulfillment processes, or changes in how departments collaborate can create gaps between system workflows and actual work.
Ask representatives from finance, sales, purchasing, inventory, fulfillment, and other relevant departments to describe how they complete important tasks today. Compare those steps with the processes configured in NetSuite. Pay attention to workarounds such as duplicate data entry, off-system approvals, separate inventory trackers, and recurring requests for administrators to correct records.
The purpose is to distinguish genuine business requirements from habits that have developed around an outdated setup. Your team should determine which problems require configuration changes, better training, process clarification, or a more substantial improvement project.
Your annual checklist:
- Compare configured workflows with the way employees actually complete their work.
- Document manual workarounds, duplicate entry, and processes maintained outside NetSuite.
- Ask department leads which recurring system limitations slow their teams down.
- Prioritize changes that address genuine process gaps rather than adding customizations for every individual request.
18. Review Your Use of Licensed Features and Modules
Your company might be paying for NetSuite features, modules, or related applications that employees rarely use. In other cases, teams might be handling work manually even though an existing capability could support the process.
Review your current licenses, enabled features, purchased modules, and actual usage. Discuss with department leads which capabilities support daily work, which remain unused, and why employees avoid them. Low usage does not automatically mean a feature is unnecessary; it could reflect limited training, incomplete configuration, a process mismatch, or a lack of awareness.
Your NetSuite experts should assess whether underused capabilities address a real business need before recommending additional tools or custom development. This review can help you identify opportunities to improve adoption, simplify existing processes, or reconsider spending that no longer supports your requirements.
Your annual checklist:
- Compare licensed capabilities with actual business usage.
- Identify paid features or modules that remain unused or underused.
- Ask employees whether training, configuration, or process limitations prevent adoption.
- Evaluate existing functionality before investing in new applications or custom development.
19. Assess NetSuite’s Readiness for Business Growth
Expansion changes what your ERP system needs to support. New subsidiaries, international operations, additional warehouses, higher transaction volumes, new sales channels, or acquisitions introduce requirements that your current configuration might not address adequately.
Discuss your company’s plans for the next 12–24 months with finance, operations, IT, and business leadership. Review whether your current subsidiary structure, reporting, access controls, inventory processes, integrations, and customizations support those plans. For example, adding a new sales channel could require changes to order synchronization, pricing, inventory visibility, and fulfillment processes.
If your organization is preparing for expansion but has not assessed the impact on NetSuite, include that work in your health check. Identifying capacity, configuration, and integration gaps early gives your team time to plan and test changes before they affect business operations.
Your annual checklist:
- Review planned changes involving subsidiaries, markets, warehouses, acquisitions, and sales channels.
- Assess the impact of growth on reporting, transaction processing, inventory, and integrations.
- Identify configuration or customization limits that could affect planned initiatives.
- Create a readiness plan for the changes that require system updates, testing, training, or additional resources.
20. Turn Your Findings Into a Prioritized Remediation Plan
A health check is useful only when its findings lead to action. Your review might uncover security gaps, outdated workflows, recurring integration failures, performance issues, unused features, or documentation problems. Treating every finding as equally urgent makes it harder to direct resources toward the issues with the greatest business impact.
Bring your finance, IT, operations, and NetSuite experts together to assess each finding. Consider its impact on financial accuracy, security, compliance, business continuity, employee productivity, and customer experience. Assign an owner and target date to each corrective action, and identify the evidence your team will use to confirm that the fix worked.
Separate urgent risks from planned improvements. A security weakness or recurring financial error deserves different treatment from a dashboard that needs refinement. Your remediation plan should make those priorities clear and give leadership a practical view of what needs attention now, what belongs in the next improvement cycle, and what requires further investigation.
Your annual checklist:
- Document each finding, its business impact, and the evidence supporting it.
- Prioritize issues according to risk, operational disruption, and urgency.
- Assign an accountable owner, target date, and next action to every significant finding.
- Retest completed fixes and schedule follow-up reviews to confirm that the problems have not returned.
How Often Should You Conduct a NetSuite Health Check?
An annual review provides a useful baseline, but some events justify an additional assessment. Your company should revisit relevant parts of the system after major organizational changes, acquisitions, significant integrations, substantial customization projects, or recurring operational failures.
A review is particularly important when your team has experienced unexplained performance problems, repeated reconciliation differences, post-release errors, unresolved audit findings, or a growing dependence on manual workarounds. These issues deserve investigation when they appear; you do not need to wait for the annual review.
You should also consider a health check when your NetSuite administrator or implementation partner changes, especially if system knowledge and customization documentation are incomplete. A new team needs to understand how the environment works before making changes that affect business-critical processes.
For a more detailed walkthrough of the review process, read How to Perform a NetSuite Health Check: Tips for a Cleaner, Faster System.
Who Should Be Involved in a NetSuite Health Check?
A useful health check combines knowledge of your business processes with technical expertise. Your internal employees understand daily work, recurring errors, reporting needs, and operational workarounds. NetSuite administrators and consultants bring the technical perspective needed to investigate configuration, scripts, workflows, integrations, security controls, and system performance.
| Team member | Role in the health check |
|---|---|
| Finance and accounting | Review financial accuracy, accounting periods, reconciliation, tax settings, approvals, and reporting. |
| IT and NetSuite administrators | Examine user access, authentication, system configuration, release readiness, and technical issues. |
| Operations and department leads | Identify process gaps, manual workarounds, data problems, and underused functionality. |
| Integration and development specialists | Investigate synchronization failures, scripts, workflows, customizations, and performance problems. |
| NetSuite consultants | Assess findings across the environment, investigate complex issues, and recommend a prioritized remediation plan. |
If your team does not have the technical expertise or available capacity to investigate complex findings, an experienced NetSuite partner can help you assess the environment and plan corrective work. The important point is to establish clear ownership so the review produces actionable results rather than a list of observations that nobody follows up on.
Get More From Your Annual NetSuite Health Check
Your annual NetSuite health check should give you a clear understanding of what is working, where risks are developing, and which improvements deserve attention first. Reviewing financial controls, user access, customizations, integrations, reporting, and business processes helps your team identify issues before they create unnecessary operational effort.
The 20-point checklist provides a starting point. The depth of the assessment should reflect your company’s system complexity, compliance obligations, integrations, customizations, and business priorities.
If you need help reviewing your NetSuite environment, identifying configuration and performance issues, or building a remediation roadmap, explore Folio3’s NetSuite Health Check services. A structured assessment can help your team understand the current state of your system and prioritize the work needed to keep it reliable as your business evolves.
Frequently Asked Questions
NetSuite is very slow. Could a health check identify the cause?
Yes, but start by narrowing down whether the delay is caused by scripts, workflows, integrations, record design, or NetSuite server performance. Check the Scripted Records section for the affected record type, review user event and client scripts, and test whether disabling or consolidating scripts improves load and save times. Also review workflow logging, unused custom fields, bundles, and integration versions. If the issue continues after removing obvious customizations, use NetSuite APM or submit a support case so NetSuite can check server-side performance.
We ran a health check before our NetSuite renewal and it showed we were under transaction and storage limits. What else should we check?
Transaction lines and storage matter, but they are not the only renewal risks. Review active users and roles, unused modules, integration usage, custom script governance, data growth, reporting performance, and whether current processes still match the original implementation.
Also confirm whether your transaction volume is trending upward, whether integrations are creating unnecessary records, and whether you need additional modules or a higher tier before the next renewal. A health check is most valuable when it gives you a forward-looking capacity and cost plan, not just a snapshot of current limits.
