NetSuite Workbooks Comparison and Usage

SuiteAnalytics workbooks help to create a customizable dashboard, analyze large amounts of data and visualize up-to-date results. Workbooks are efficient in analyzing data which may include adding any new column with existing information combined into different fields. It can quickly create formulas for calculating values for reports. The data can be sorted quickly. Also, different types of filters can be created to classify the data according to requirements. Lastly, the audience can be edited for reports. For example, the reports can be modified to view according to different roles such as; any specific subsidiary, all accountants, or specific employees.

Comparison with Saved Searches

A lot of different analytical tools in NetSuite such as saved searches provide the filtered records in a tabular format. However, viewing results in tabular format can be difficult for large amounts of data. On the other hand, workbooks can demonstrate the data using charts or graphs. The visualization helps to view the data easily and analyze the trends in the data. Moreover, the saved searches do not provide real-time data and can be scheduled to run at different intervals to provide recent records. On the contrary, workbooks can be refreshed with real-time data and interactive dashboards can be shared among different users. The saved searches take a lot of time in processing large amounts of data. It gives timeout errors when there is a huge amount of data. For instance, a simple search query with a ‘contains’ filter can take a lot of time. A ‘contains’ filter is used to search the records with the specific text. The results might not be retrieved instantly on large data, thus, users might have to schedule results. Therefore, users try to limit the specific date range of records or the number of columns to retrieve results easily. On the other hand, workbooks can easily manage large data and provide results instantly on the dashboard. 

Comparison with SuiteAnalytics

Workbooks help provide advanced analysis of the data. They support great customizations as compared to SuiteAnalytics. Workbooks are more flexible and can use data from multiple sources. Some examples are as follows: 

1. A single workbook can pull data from multiple sources. It can be helpful to analyze different parts of the organization including finance, sales, etc.
2. It also allows the creation of custom calculations that are not available in the SuiteAnalytics. Complex calculations can be useful for analysis.
3. The workbooks can be used for creating customized advanced reports. It can be formatted according to specific audiences.
4. Workbooks can help to plan different what-if scenarios to analyze the impact of different variables on the financial data. It can assist in forecasting future data.
5. Workbooks can handle large datasets which is a limitation when working with SuiteAnalytics. Hence, a large amount of data can be analyzed including transactional and complex data. 

Overall, NetSuite workbooks are efficient and provide good performance for large data. They are more flexible as compared to other tools .anf provide more advanced analysis capabilities. 

Workbooks can be used to analyze different types of data. It includes; sales data, purchasing data, inventory management, and financial data. One such example is to find insights about sales data, that is which products are sold more, which customers purchase them, the trends in customer behavior, and products bought often.   

To understand the use of workbooks, let’s look into an example to find out the top 10 items ordered by customers in the year 2022. In NetSuite, the workbooks can be navigated by: Clicking on the ‘Analytics’ center tab and clicking the ‘New Workbook’ button. It will show the datasets of NetSuite and select the ‘Sales (Ordered)’ dataset. The sales data set contains the list of transactions that were made by customers on NetSuite. It contains the item, customer, date, amount, location, and other details of the transaction. The example discussed above can be demonstrated using the following steps;

• Add customer in the Y axis
• Add item in Series
• Add Date in Series
• Add Quantity (Sum) in measure

Now let’s filter the records to find the Top 10 items ordered by customers in the year 2022.

• Click the 3 dots on the item in the Series and select ‘Top 10 item’
• Click the 3 dots on the Date in the Series and select ‘Filter Date by’ then click ‘year’. Now select 2020 and click the right arrow to specify the year and click ‘Apply’.

Click the refresh icon on top of the workbook to view the result. This is how the chart will look like:

The chart demonstrated that product ‘CAM00006’ was the most ordered by the client ‘Academy Avenue Liquor Store’ in the year 2022. The workbook can be advanced to find out more insights about the sales data. Or any sort of data. It provides a drag-and-drop interface to create charts very easily. Different measures can be added as well including the calculated measures using any formula. It also provides a lot of different charts which can be selected according to the requirements.

References:

https://insightsoftware.com/blog/going-beyond-netsuite-saved-searches-to-meet-financial-reporting-needs/

https://www.netsuite.com/portal/resource/articles/erp/easier-and-faster-suiteanalytics-workbook-delivers-enhancements.shtml

https://www.velosio.com/blog/netsuite-suiteanalytics-tools/

https://www.anchorgroup.tech/learn-netsuite-suiteanalytics

https://www.mindstreamanalytics.com/suite-analytics-vs-nsaw.html