NetSuite defines a custom record type as “an entry form you create to collect information specific to the needs of your business. You can attach information from custom records to entities, items or transactions using custom fields.” In other words, a custom record can be used to bridge the gap between what your business needs and what an out of the box ERP system can provide. Custom records are a common tool used by consultants during the architecture phase of a project. I’ve listed several examples to explain different ways to use custom record types.
Online forms
Online forms can be used to collect a variety of information from your website. These can include surveys about customer satisfactions and demo inquiries.
Survey – A company would like to send out a customer satisfaction survey. The goal is to record how likely a client is to reorder their product after 5, 10, and 15 years. By using a saved search, the company can isolate three groups of recipients by the amount of time they have been working together. The 5 year questions are different from the 10 year questions, etc. Instead of creating three record types, one for each pool of customer by age, the company decides to create one record called survey and use multiple custom forms to display different questions. Each form is displayed conditionally after a transaction is finished at checkout. The results are directly recorded in the survey record. The survey record is child of the customer record, so the results can also be viewed on a survey sublist.
Company Structure
A customer owns about 20 additional companies. These companies are not tracked as customers in NetSuite because we do not want to add non-transacted upon customers to the database. Two record types were created: Company Entity and Company Ownership Percentage. Using custom records, we were able to keep an accurate track of a unique entity type and ownership structure in NetSuite. The two record types are listed below in more detail.
Company Entity – This record contains what year the company was founded, income, company type (ex LLC), and a sublist called Company Ownership Percentage.
Company Ownership Percentage – This record links multiple Company Entity records by listing the ownership percentage and value that “Company A” owns of “Company B.” It is a child of the Company Entity record. “Company A” can own 5 percent of seven companies, and this is tracked on a sublist on the Company Entity record.
Third party data
An organization would like to integrate its product into NetSuite. They allow users to identify who visited the client’s website. These viewers can be imported as leads. Custom records can be used in the following way:
Website Visit – A website visit is a unique visit to a client’s site. Each time a potential client visits www.testcompany.com, the third party software notes how long they visited, the time, and what location they visited from.
Page Visit – On each visit, a potential client views various pages on the website. This will indicate interest in a product by how long they spent on each page. If a customer spends 15 minutes reading a NetSuite blog and leaves, a sales person will be able to use that information during a follow-up call. The page visit is a child of the site visit.
These are just a few examples of the many ways to use custom record types.
Want to ensure your business is getting the most out of your NetSuite usage and investment? Learn more about our NetSuite Support services.
Additional NetSuite Resources
NetSuite Advanced PDF Tips and Tricks – Part 1
Preserving carriage returns while integrating data from a legacy system to Netsuite
Reconciling NetSuite Purchase Order Variances with Post Vendor Bill Variance
