Driving Value Through Financial Insights: How NetSuite Empowers Finance Teams

Making smart financial decisions is crucial for any growing business. However, many finance teams lack the timely, accurate data needed to properly guide business strategy. Legacy ERP systems with disjointed modules create financial blindspots that hide emerging risks and opportunities.

That’s why forward-thinking companies turn to NetSuite for unified financial visibility. By consolidating financial data across the business into a single source of truth, NetSuite helps CFOs and controllers gain the valuable insights they need to drive growth.

In this post, we’ll explore key ways NetSuite improves financial decision-making by:

• Unifying financial data for a single source of truth
• Automating report creation for self-service insights
• Enabling continuous planning through rolling forecasts
• Identifying trends with real-time analytics
• Empowering collaboration through the cloud

We’ll also discuss how our team of NetSuite experts at Anchor Group help finance leaders implement these capabilities to maximize value.

Unified Data Enables a Single Source of Financial Truth

Legacy ERP systems built on separate modules struggle to give finance teams the whole picture they need for smart planning. Disjointed data requires tedious manual consolidation across general ledger, billing, inventory, and more. This not only consumes time, but also leaves ample room for error and discrepancies across reports.

In contrast, NetSuite was purpose-built as an integrated cloud platform spanning ERP, CRM, ecommerce, and HR on a unified data foundation. This gives finance leaders a single version of the truth across all business dimensions in real time.

With NetSuite, there’s no need for manual reconciliations or uncertainty around which numbers are correct. You gain instant visibility across:

• Financial performance – From general ledger and payables/receivables to revenue recognition and fixed assets
• Customer activity – Such as sales and marketing campaign results, pipeline changes, order status, and satisfaction
• Inventory movements – Including supply/demand shifts, costs, and inventory value
• People data – Like headcount, salaries, and absence tracking
• And more – Such as projects, billing, and subscriptions

Rather than piecing together disjointed reports, you can access integrated financial dashboards for at-a-glance insights into performance. This helps finance directors and controllers better guide business strategy in alignment with emerging opportunities and risks.

For example, clear visibility of aging receivables makes it easier to align sales and collections processes to improve cash flow. Understanding peak inventory periods helps better plan purchasing to meet demand without excess stock. And tracking resource utilization across projects shines a light on profitability to guide staffing and pricing decisions.

Automated Reports Provide On-Demand Insights

While unified data delivers a single source of truth, finance teams also need the ability to easily access and report on this data to drive decisions. Unfortunately, legacy systems require significant IT support to create and distribute custom reports – resulting in long lag times that reduce relevance.

NetSuite eliminates these bottlenecks by enabling self-service financial reporting through:

• Custom report builder – Finance users can easily create and modify reports without relying on IT teams. Conditional formatting, calculations, and more enable rich insights.
• Saved searches – Filter, sort, or export any transactional data without writing SQL code for quick analysis.
• Report snapshots – Schedule reports to automatically run on regular intervals and deliver to key stakeholders for consistent visibility into KPIs.
• Dashboards – Tailor snapshot views of critical financial and operational KPIs to specific roles or objectives.
• Pixel perfect reporting – Map existing report layouts into NetSuite’s reporting engine for continuity.

This automation and customization frees finance staff from routine reporting so they can focus on value-add analysis and planning. Leadership can self-serve the precise insights they need on-demand instead of waiting for month-end reports. By enabling granular views across various business drivers, NetSuite empowers continuous improvement cycles rather than reactive firefighting.

Rolling Forecasts Enable Continuous Planning  

While rear-view financial reporting provides useful hindsight, finance chiefs need predictive visibility to guide business strategy. Annual budgeting and quarterly forecasts on rigid timelines struggle to reflect rapidly changing conditions in today’s dynamic markets.

NetSuite offers built-in support for rolling forecasts so finance departments can continuously realign targets to seize emerging opportunities and mitigate emerging risks. Ongoing visibility into pipeline, bookings, and expenses enables more accurate revenue planning, cash flow optimization, and cost management.

Finance leaders can assess variance between actuals and forecasts at shorter intervals to improve modeling accuracy. Tight links between sales leading indicators and financial plan assumptions enable smarter goal setting. With financial planning part of their day-to-day operations rather than a detached quarterly exercise, finance teams can play a more strategic role in driving business growth.

Real-Time Analytics Identify Performance Drivers  

While rolling forecasts help finance departments continuously realign targets, real-time analytics enables them to understand why they need realigning in the first place. Spotting the root causes behind developing performance gaps, positive or negative, empowers smarter planning.

Here NetSuite also shines with built-in business intelligence delivering actionable insights into:

• Customer profitability – Identify best customers to grow and unprofitable ones to cull based on granular visibility into lifetime value.
• Win/loss analysis – Get clarity into proposal conversion rates, lost deal root causes, and proposal performance by rep to improve sales efficiency.
• Inventory costs – Get visibility into true carrying costs to optimize stock levels, set pricing, and boost margins.
• Resource utilization – Analyze employee time tracking and project budget vs. actuals to improve services pricing and staffing decisions.
• Churn analysis – Pinpoint at-risk customers based on behavioral and spending changes so account managers can proactively nurture these relationships.

By continually exposing the underlying drivers behind financial outcomes rather than just the outcomes themselves, NetSuite enables finance to guide decisions towards growth and profitability.

Cloud Platform Drives Cross-Organization Collaboration

Making financial insights actionable across the business requires collaboration between finance and departmental operations teams. However, siloed on-premise enterprise software makes this difficult by constraining data access within organizational boundaries.

As a unified cloud platform, NetSuite breaks down these barriers by providing appropriate access to essential KPIs across roles. Sales teams get visibility into the customer revenue and margin impact of their deals. Services delivery teams understand project budget status and profitability. Marketers see campaign costs and pipeline generated.

This alignment on key metrics drives better decision making across teams in support of shared business goals. Custom roles and permissions ensure sensitive data remains secure while still enabling cross-functional transparency into financial performance drivers – something legacy systems struggle to provide.

Moreover, widespread mobile access accelerates workflows by enabling faster response times regardless of location. Stakeholders get real-time notifications on financial metrics crossing key thresholds via SMS, push notifications, and email. This empowers them to course correct quickly even while on-the-go.

Reaping the Benefits Through Anchor Group  

As the above examples illustrate, NetSuite provides a powerful tool to transform financial decision-making. But technology alone isn’t enough. Realizing NetSuite’s full value requires an effective implementation tailored to your finance team’s objectives and processes.

This is where Anchor Group steps in. As finance specialists, we help you:

• Streamline financial processes using NetSuite best practices
• Create KPIs and role-based reports that provide actionable insights
• Automate reporting cadences to support continuous planning needs
• Integrate real-time analytics to uncover performance drivers
• Expand system access to improve enterprise-wide collaboration

With deep NetSuite expertise across 100+ implementations, and a key focus on financial management, Anchor Group helps you maximize value from your investment.

Want to learn more? Contact us to schedule a free consultation and see how NetSuite can transform financial leadership and decision making for your organization.