Netsuite Review

Overall, my experience with NetSuite has been positive -- the interface is very user-friendly and the ability to basically drill through into anything is incredibly helpful helpful. In the past I had used Oracle Financials, which was a black box by comparison -- very difficult to navigate, few drill-through capabilities, and un-intuitive UI. In NetSuite, it's easy to get going and quickly gain an understanding of a new GL at a new job-- you can always get to the next level of detail. The reporting, while not perfect, is also an improvement over Oracle. With some basic understanding of the interface, you can drag and drop as needed to create reports and data exports (Saved Searches). The biggest challenge with these is knowing field names and how objects are connected-- these things are not always intuitive and it can take some time and trial and error to get what you need. The one issue with the software is that it appears to be intermittently buggy-- it has gotten better in the 3 years I've been using it, but in my time using it, I've had issues with changes not saving (which have mostly been fixed over time). More recently, I've been working for a company that requires daily time tracking, and it's not an uncommon problem for myself and others to have submitted time either disappear or get "stuck in limbo" where we can see it but the approver can't. This doesn't exactly sit well, as it makes you wonder what else in you GL might not be as secure or lock-tight as you would want. I'll also say that I have no idea how this works in a bigger organization-- both places I've used it have been 50-100 employees and no foreign entities. It does work great for this size of company, though.

Pros

Great UI, Intuitive reports and searches, great data/transaction/object transparency, easy to access anything and move around in the system

Cons

Lots of fields with similar names, no way to see underlying data map, some modules are not always as tight as you would like them to be with data saving and transmission

Insight from a decade of NetSuite user experience

Pros

A cloud-based ERP system like NetSuite is a great choice for most small to medium-sized companies looking for data security, system reliability, robust feature set, perpetual upgrades and lifetime cost. NetSuite blends a wide sweep of core functionality with long and growing list of 3rd-party integrations to specialized service providers. Built-in twice annual upgrades and 99.999% uptime is better than you could ever achieve on your own and does not require any technical overhead to install or maintain.

Cons

NetSuite is not cheap. You really have to value the lifetime cost of making the investment in a fully-integrated system. Historically, the feature "roadmap" has been a year or two ahead of the product reality. You should be prepared to make compromises in specific functionality or invest in customization. Support used to be more of an issue but has shown definite signs of improvement over the last couple of years.

Netsuite is a great ERP software that's always investing and improving in it's platform development, based on customer feedback for new features and underlying frame work.

Despite the Cons stated above, Netsuite is a software that constantly being improved to resolve such issues. So I'm sure these limitations will be handled by the Netsuite Development team in the near future.

Pros

I really like the ease of use features and administration as aspects of net suite. It give the global visibility and local visibility of your business at a click of a button. It's easy to customize to most of your requirements without too much coding for development.

Cons

The Account receivable features for posting over payments, under payments and income without an invoice is done though manual journal entries and takes many steps compare to Sage. Also it doesn't allow you to consolidate invoice Netsuite Transactions. This means if you want to create a single invoice for more than 1 sales orders, you can't do that at present. When it comes to coding, you can't process more than 200 transactions to automatically using suite scripts, etc.

Have been using NetSuite for 8 years

Pros

The thing I like most about NetSuite is the versatility and customizability of the product. If we need to flag specific transactions for internal and unique reasons, we are able to add a checkbox to any transaction that the user can check, which will flag an alert. It is truly helpful to be able to customize the forms within the system.

Another thing that we like about this is that it is internet-based. We are not required to maintain servers and software. We have employees in multiple locations including some working from their homes. It is nice that all they need to work on the system is internet access!

The product is constantly being improved upon. We like that NetSuite continues to grow as their customers' needs grow.

Cons

In the beginning, eight years ago, the support and service on this product were horrible. Since then, I have seen great improvements in support, including reduced hold times and an increased knowledge of the product. The other thing that I have noticed is that the sales team tends to oversell the features. NetSuite's program in and of itself is an amazing program. There is no need for any embellishment, but, on numerous occasions, I have experienced being sold on features that were not available when I tried to use them.

One of the things that can be seen as either good or bad is that there are some gaps in functionality (e.g., forecasting, shipping integration with outside vendors). However, there are a growing number of outside vendors that will integrate your NetSuite with outside vendors to fill the gaps. The customization of NetSuite is endless, although these outside vendors do charge a good fee for their work.

Netsuite is an intuitive, easy-to-use, ERP software for all.

Pros

Netsuite's functions, both for front office and back office individuals is intuitive. A minimal amount of support / help menus is necessary to be able to access and utilize the features of Netsuite. I enjoy and appreciate how customize-able Netsuite is with minimal IT or programming experience - it is an ERP software for really everyone. Netsuite is constantly coming up with new features to enhance my experience, and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the ERP.

Cons

I wish that there were a better help menu / functionality - it is good that Netsuite is so easy to use, because the "help" function is often times not helpful. I also wish that customer service were more customer-oriented, it is often times confusing as to who I should contact (whether it be Netsuite directly, or my Netsuite sales / account rep). I also wish that the new features (such as the verticals) had more demos available online, so that it'd be easier to see and know what kinds of additional functionality they have to offer.

Went live on Global Financial in January 2018. It was a challenging project but a lot of that was our complex integrations

I would like to see the CSV uploads made more user friendly to create a better user experience foe data entry. The system is pretty easy to use and the access to data is great.

Pros

Search and queries capabilities are very useful. System is easy to learn. It seems to be very configurable too.

Cons

Some controls from a standard accounting perspective are lacking. Such as, an invoice GL entry can be zeroed out after posting if canceled within the period. We have daily balancing processes and automated matching and we cannot have an entry that was previously reconciled just change to zero. There should be a reversing entry for an audit trail and better controls when this happens. Also should be able to cancel invoice from prior month. We have had to create a workaround in netsuite for this. Also, date fields need improvement. Such as, effective date for invoice GL activity is the effective date of the invoice. The GL entry post to the oldest open period. This does not allow you to use effective date effectively because it may not relate to the period it is posted to. There should be a date the GL is effective form a posting period perspective. to have to use the posting period field is not the best. Also we have batch interfaces that come in through the night but even if they come in after 12 am they are part of the prior day activity. To be able to reconcile and control what has impacted GL with a batch day we had to add a custom batch date field which is triggered to change when our batch cycle jobs end.

Great Software Powers Business Growth

NetSuite is a great partner as they mean what they say, do their best to deliver on their promises and generally does a great job of executing. They can do better with Dev/Ops in general and improving the speed of the applications.

Pros

Ease of Use, Value for Money, Flexibility / Ease of Adjustment, Support is Timely, Product Development is Just Right (Not too Many but Enough to Evolve the Solution), Prioritization of Customizations is Done Well

Cons

Support Team Needs More Training, Coordination between Back-end Performance and Support Teams is Under-developments and Poorly Managed, Hosting of Application is Not Done Well (too many outages), Performance of Cloud App is too Slow

Lost at sea

Pros

There are a lot of features. we use the software in a number of departments and each have found their way to make it work.

Cons

any time we have an issue with behavior, we end up having to come up with some kind of workaround instead of it actually being fixed by the developer. so, the lots of features mentioned as a positive above will continue to diminish (i expect) until it really is of no use to us. a bit melodramatic, i admit, but quite frustrated. On training day, something didn't work, so it got postponed, never to happen. we've had to mostly just figure it out.

NetSuite is a Charm

Pros

NetSuite is so flexible.
It can be customized using different ways like workflows, scripting, forms, fields, layouts.

Cons

There are a lot of supposed basic functionality that is not available in NetSuite. We have to build and pay for customization because NetSuite does not have the basic functionality.
Some controls in terms of permission is very loose. We have to make sure that all customization measures are checked to make sure that any settings we have built did not break these permissions. This is very hard to monitor as well for access reviews.

Great software with good flexibility

Pros

Everything you need is in one package & you can turn features on and off depending on the nature of your business. We've found that as our business changes, teams will have requests for additional fields, searches, etc - I can add it all in myself in very little time. And I'm not a programmer!

Support team is wonderful - 24 hours/day with very quick response. When I had problems changing the map over too Baidu maps, they worked with me and sent me new code to implement and filed it as an enhancement request.
Online help articles usually solve my questions.

Cons

People who grew up on Macs want more graphic interfaces like Pipedrive (for sales lead management) - they think the interface is too database-driven