Top 5 Tips for Better NetSuite Searches

One of the biggest benefits of NetSuite is the ability to pull information from the entire company into a single system. To make the most of this key benefit, NetSuite offers a powerful Search tool to help users easily find and utilize the information they need to answer critical business questions. These five tips will help you make the most of your NetSuite searches: 1) Adjust Role Setting to Limit Who Can Publish Custom Searches We’ve worked with companies that have hundreds of custom searches and reports cluttering quick search results and confusing process workflows for front line employees. Taking ten minutes to limit search publishing to the proper roles can prevent this from happening. 2) Use Descriptive and Standardized Names Even common sense requires your help to be put into practice. The title of a search should reflect its primary focus, not the totality of what’s included. You can organize your searches by ending the search title with the intended function of the search like “- View”, “- Reminder”, or “- KPI”. 3) Discourage People from Keeping Private Versions of Public Searches When people create their own private versions of custom public searches, you lose visibility into what people are seeing. Any updates you apply to the public search won’t carry over to the private searches. This opens you up to costly business mistakes due to out-of-date data views. Errors like this are 100% preventable if IT and business decision makers agree that public searches are the trusted, up-to-date authority. 4) Account for Null Values When Using a Formula Consider a simple formula to calculate on hand inventory plus quantity on order:

{quantityonhand} + {quantityonorder}

The result for any column with either a NULL {quantityonhand} or {quantityonorder} will be NULL, which shows up as a blank in the search results. This really becomes an issue when you’re using the formula as part of your search criteria. In a simple scenario where you want to reorder any item with an On Hand + On Order quantity less than 100, use this:

NVL({quantityonhand},0) + NVL({quantityonorder},0) < 100

Not this:

{quantityonhand} + {quantityonorder} < 100

The first example will replace all NULL values with 0 before adding the two columns together and comparing the result to 100. The second example will simply exclude all items with a NULL value in either column. An item with 50 pieces on hand but none on order would be excluded from your search results in the second example, leading to a possible stock out situation! 5) Beware of How Joining Tables Will Affect Aggregate Results Joining more than one table to the search results and then aggregating results with count and sum functions can open you and your business up to data errors. Consider a case where you want to see the 60 day sales totals for each item as well as the most recent note for that item. You’re joining the “Transactions” and “User Notes” tables to the “Items” table. If you simply sum the quantity sold for each item, your aggregate results will end up showing (Quantity Sold * Count of User Notes) for each item. To counteract that, use logic in the Total Quantity Sold field to divide back out the Count of User Notes. Alternatively, you may want to evaluate whether this amount if complication is truly justified by your business needs. Have questions about how to use Search and other NetSuite features to boost your business? Give us a call and ask to speak with one of our Cloud Enablement experts. We’d be happy to talk through your situation and explore areas where we might be able to help.