The Top Five NetSuite Features You’re Not Using Enough
NetSuite has thousands of features designed to streamline every step of your financial cycle, from forecasting to reconciliation. The most commonly used NetSuite features are customer management, sales forecasting, and reporting and analytics. But with 1,426 features, it’s to be expected that there will be some stellar ones that don’t quite make your radar. So we gathered up our top five under-utilized NetSuite features and their benefits.
Payroll
Payroll doesn’t have to be a nightmare. NetSuite’s SuitePeople, a full-service payroll solution for the United States, makes payroll a breeze. By automating payroll processes, including calculating gross-to-net earnings, tax withholding, deductions, and scheduling and issuing payments, SuitePeople takes the stress out of payroll and frees up your time.
SuitePeople offers dashboards, analytics, reports, self-service capabilities, up-to-date calculations, and the ability to automatically update the general ledger (GL) in real-time, taking the pain out of running scheduled or even off-cycle payrolls.
NetSuite’s Payroll features include:
Flexible Pay Methods
Your employees can set up direct deposits for up to ten bank accounts and edit their information as needed.
Filing and Deposits
NetSuite automates deposits for federal, state, and local taxes and all quarterly and annual federal, state, and local tax form filings. Using SuiteApp, W-2 and 1099 MISC forms can be easily and quickly prepared, printed, and filed for employees and contractors at year’s end, ensuring compliance with all tax and payroll regulations.
Employee Self-Service
Your workers can securely view and change their information at any time, keeping their records up-to-date. They will also have the ability to view up to five previous paychecks, W-4 information, and expense reports, meaning questions get answered fast — without even talking to HR.
Variable Pay
Flexible options allow you to easily include variable payments — like bonuses, commissions, and other incentive compensation or expense payments — in your payroll.
Dashboards and Reports
NetSuite’s payroll includes 100+ standard reports and KPIs that you can customize, or the option to build your own. In addition, dashboards break down payroll expenses by location, department, and subsidiary, allowing you to monitor payroll trends and compare actual results to other periods.
Tax Management & Compliance
Tax laws and protocols are constantly changing, and while your accounting team may have a spreadsheet that applies to every tax law, some changes to the tax code might go unnoticed. Before you know it, your highly organized spreadsheets turn into guesswork, leading to non-compliance.
NetSuite offers an indirect tax management solution — called SuiteTax — a configurable tax engine that enables end-to-end global tax management. Your finance team can quickly generate detailed reports and analyze transactions in real-time with features like:
Automated VAT/GST Calculation
NetSuite’s built-in capabilities automatically run calculations on every transaction in your account, for every tax jurisdiction, verifying each customer and vendor’s VAT registration number to calculate the correct taxes for all goods and services.
U.S. Sales Tax
Monitoring and complying with sales taxes across the U.S. can be costly and time-consuming. SuiteTax delivers automated monthly tax rates for all jurisdictions, ensuring you can apply the correct rate to every transaction, every time.
Audit Capabilities
Each invoice includes tax calculations per line item, showing the rationale and country-specific compliance text (in any language) to ensure absolute accuracy. All customer and vendor detail changes and rate change histories are recorded, so you can wave goodbye to frantically searching through old records to find information you never thought you’d need again.
Flexible Reporting
NetSuite’s configurable reports enable real-time visibility into your sales tax position with automated summaries, transaction-level subsidiary rundowns, and localized reports means faster, easier tax reporting.
Tax Service Partners
SuiteTax provides finance teams freedom to choose the best solution for each subsidiary with the option to link with multiple tax service providers, allowing for increased control and visibility into every step of the tax process.
General Ledger
As the core of every accounting system, the general ledger has to be dynamic, adaptable, and scalable. NetSuite’s General Ledger (NetSuite GL) enables you to increase accuracy and efficiencies, make better decisions, and consolidate and close your finances faster and easier.
NetSuite’s General Ledger offers the following eight key features to give your company the flexibility, insight, and control you need to keep up with ever-changing business needs and requirements:
Automation
Kiss manual journal entries goodbye because NetSuite GL automates routine calculations, reducing the time and effort needed for account reconciliations, closes, and audits.
Chart of Accounts
Complex tracking codes can be a thing of the past. Instead, NetSuite GL offers a simplified chart of accounts structure to organize financial and statistical data for easy-breezy reporting.
Segments
By defining custom GL segments (like profit center, fund, program, subsidiary, class, department, location, etc.), you can save time and improve accuracy by verifying double-entry accounting principles and balancing the data across each segment combination.
Budget Tracking
With predefined budgets generated with NetSuite Planning and Budgeting or imported .csv files, you gain the ability to track revenue and expenses against these predefined budgets in real-time.
Banking Integration
NetSuite GL’s banking integration allows you to automatically import bank and credit card information into NetSuite, reconcile statements with general ledger accounts, connect to thousands of financial institutions worldwide, and gain cash flow insights at a single glance. An intelligent engine compares bank data against existing transactions, automatically reconciling approved entries and flagging issues so they can be immediately addressed.
Multiple Books
Get rid of the need for manual adjustments and data entry replication with NetSuite’s multi-book accounting capabilities with prebuilt mapping capabilities connecting primary and secondary charts of accounts. The NetSuite multi-book engine records all book-specific activity from the general ledger, including revenue recognition, upcoming expenses and payments, and P&L allocations.
Multiple Currencies and Tax Structures
Maintain accurate tax records, save time, and minimize errors with the ability to handle currency conversions using up-to-date exchange rates automatically. NetSuite GL enables easy compliance with local and international tax rules.
Reporting
NetSuite GL enables multidimensional analysis of financial and operational information and the ability to automatically consolidate and create reports. You can schedule reports to be generated and emailed daily, weekly, or monthly.
Planning and Budgeting
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting enables finance teams to quickly and easily generate budgets, forecasts, and reports by automating labor-intensive processes.
Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC)
To help customers and potential customers meet compliance requirements, NetSuite offers several independent, third-party audited certifications and reports that specify the operating effectiveness of controls in place within NetSuite. These reports typically include:
- A wide-ranging scope, including what applications and modules are and are not included in the report.
- Controls that cover:
- The system development life cycle (SDLC) and change management
- Logical access and security
- Data back-ups and restoration
- System availability and uptime
- Customer data access controls
Some of the reports/certifications NetSuite currently offer include but are not limited to:
- Audited financial statements/SEC filings
- ISO 27001 Certification
- AICPA SSAE 18 Type II/IAASB ISAE 3402 (SOC1)
- Service Organization Control 2 Type II (SOC2)
- Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS)
- PA-DSS
- Privacy Certifications
With NetSuite’s audited financial statements and reports, you can rest assured that your business fully meets all compliance requirements.
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