It’s that wonderful time of year once again—the first Cloud release season of the year. An occurrence awaited by customers prospects, and analysts, release season is a twice-yearly event in which vendors like NetSuite put out their latest improvements to the software—with each functionality enhancement built to make your job easier and your business decisions smarter.

Whether these improvements were added to make fixes to the product,  keep up with, or drive forward the market, vendors have put a ton of work and time into planning and building each enhancement. As always, we like to take a look at these changes and write a bit on the things that users and new customers can expect.

Knowing this, in the coming weeks, we’ll spend a bit of time digging into each of the updates, providing looks at NetSuite’s improvements to the overall product and their industry-focused enhancements.

A Broad Range of Improvements and Growth:

As discussed in the NetSuite Podcast, users and leaders will be treated to a variety of new features set to improve the way they work. From financial improvements to intelligence and automation, NetSuite didn’t take this release lightly as they seek to retain their spot at the top of the Cloud ERP food chain.

Planning dozens or hundreds of new additions, NetSuite developers hope this will set customers up for success in tumultuous times by facilitating customers’ financial and operational business processes. Here are just some of the big things coming to the platform:

Smart Financials and Operational Automation

The core area of any ERP is its financial and operational enhancements—and NetSuite doesn’t disappoint.

Centralized Subsidiary Purchasing and Billing

Companies will now have the freedom to consolidate purchases across multi-subsidiary organizations and generate vendor payments from a single location. This can reduce purchase order volume and automate corresponding cross-charges.

The payoff: better spend management and increased productivity.

Expense Commitments and Budget Validation

Prevent overspending with new expense commitments and budget validation functionality that validates purchase requests and orders against an organization’s available budget, ensuring that budgets are closely followed.

Email Approvals in SuiteApprovals

Spend less time clicking and more time doing. Expected to help companies become more flexible, SuiteApprovals now provides email approval which makes it possible to review, approve or reject transactions on the go by simply clicking on email links. Staff can use the accompanying email approval log to review and audit email approval actions before they are updated in the system.

Project Accounting Enhancements

An area that NetSuite has continued to improve, project accounting is built to help facilitate the entire service process. Designed around the unique needs of the project-based company, continued improvement will help you to increase project profitability, improve customer satisfaction, and make better decisions. Here are just some of the things to expect.

SuiteProjects Professional Services Automation Makes Its Debut

One of the biggest improvements, NetSuite 2021 Release 1 introduces SuiteProjects, a professional services automation solution built natively on NetSuite. SuiteProjects combines capabilities in project management, resource management, project budgeting and project accounting, providing complete visibility into, and control over projects and billable resources. 

Ready to integrate with NetSuite CRM, financials and SuitePeople, SuiteProjects becomes the finishing touch on a comprehensive single platform for running a services business.

Purchasing and Project Integration

Keep your projects in line with project purchase automation that lets project managers initiate purchases directly from projects, providing project views of purchase transactions and enabling the routing of purchase approvals. Facilitate collaboration, simplify the user experience, and get a clear picture of how purchases are affecting projects.

Time and Expense Enhancements

An area with continued improvement, time and expense in NetSuite got a bit more in 2021 Release 1. Expense report policies can be expanded to set limits for each expense line in a project, and additional filters allow for control of policies based on billable line items. Employees with billable hours now have the freedom to retract submitted timesheets before they’re approved, saving time for employees, approvers and administrators alike.

Platform and Analytics Improvements

Software can’t work without a strong backend—and NetSuite has put a lot of effort into improving both its platform and analytics capabilities.

Enhanced REST Web Services Support

Get more integration with NetSuite. New application performance management (APM) dashboards monitor and analyze the health of REST web services-based integrations. 

Give Admins More Control over Authentication

SuiteScript APIs have been made more powerful and easier to use for application development and account customization projects, and the new secrets management feature set enables developers to securely manage authentication information.

Give Developers More Power

Developers are now able to work with significantly larger data sets by virtue of asynchronous coding techniques. They can also use native Chrome debugger support for SuiteScript to test and debug applications without leaving browser context.

Stay Tuned: Deeper Dive Coming Soon

With so much information being released about the continued improvements for NetSuite, we like to spend a couple blogs to simply look at it all. In the coming weeks, expect deeper dives into the enhancements being made for product-based businesses including a healthy update to inventory management, shipping, and sales.

Learn even more by reading NetSuite’s breakdown of each industry-focused improvement—Manufacturing, Wholesale Distributors, Retail, Software, Services, and Nonprofit by clicking your industry or stay tuned for our blog on this by subscribing to the MIBAR mailing list.

Get to Know More About NetSuite

Another big release for NetSuite users, these enhancements are going to help you do your job more effectively and stay ahead of the competition. Looking to learn even more? Stay tuned for our look into the industry-specific enhancements or register for a NetSuite demo.

Want to ensure your business is getting the most out of your NetSuite usage and investment? Learn more about our NetSuite Support services.