Financial leaders today face immense pressure. As the stewards of organizational performance, CFOs must track an ever-growing number of financial and operational metrics across a complex business landscape. At the same time, they are expected to provide strategic guidance to fuel growth.
Having real-time visibility into the numbers is the foundation on which all else is built. NetSuite empowers CFOs and finance teams to gain that visibility while automating manual processes – boosting efficiency, insight, and control. This allows financial leaders to shift their focus from data gathering and reconciliation to strategy, analysis, and optimization for driving the business forward.
The Challenge of Piecing Together Disparate Systems
A major pain point for many CFOs is inheriting a patchwork of disconnected systems requiring manual processes to consolidate data. Such environments typically include:
- Multiple general ledgers
- Standalone billing, inventory, ecommerce, POS, HCM, and other systems
- Spreadsheets for consolidation and reporting
In this situation, finance teams must export data from different applications, combine it in spreadsheets, and manipulate it. The prevalence of manual processes not only consumes time but also heightens the risk of errors. Different versions of the truth in various systems also make it extremely difficult to see the big picture.
At the same time, CEOs and other leaders have mounting requests for custom views and real-time reporting. How can finance provide timely insights when simply reconciling and consolidating data is such an effort? Lacking visibility into the true state of the organization, leaders often make critical decisions based on outdated, incomplete, or inaccurate information.
Why CFOs Need a Unified Cloud Platform?
CFOs require real-time access to financial and operational data in order to guide business strategy and minimize risk. NetSuite enables just that with a unified cloud platform that brings together financial management, CRM and ecommerce, inventory and order management, business intelligence, and HR on a single system.
By eliminating fragmented processes, CFOs gain complete visibility in real-time across the organization. The ability to rapidly consolidate and report on financial and operational metrics enables:
- Faster financial close – NetSuite reduces close time by up to 90%
- Continuous planning – Real-time analytics and modeling enable agile decision making
- Global scalability – Manage financial consolidation for multi-national operations
- Auditing and compliance – Tighten controls and financial governance across the system
For growing companies, NetSuite also facilitates IPO and investor readiness. The unified data and processes provide the visibility and control needed to meet compliance requirements.
Automating Processes for Greater Efficiency and Control
Migrating from manual processes to automated workflows is transformative for finance teams. Consider the dramatic improvements with:
Procure-to-Pay
NetSuite automates the entire procure-to-pay process from purchase requests to invoice reconciliation. Touchless electronic routing, approval workflow, and integration to accounts payable reduces administrative tasks while enforcing controls.
Revenue Recognition
Automated revenue recognition based on business models and rules ensures completeness and accuracy. NetSuite helps companies accelerate revenue recognition processes and reporting.
Account Reconciliations
Automated matching and reconciliation of intercompany transactions, bank accounts, credit card statements, and more eliminates manual intervention and speeds period-end closing.
Financial Consolidation and Reporting
NetSuite enables CFOs to seamlessly perform financial consolidation across multiple entities and subsidiaries. It also automates reconciliation of elimination and minority interest transactions. Dynamic, real-time reporting allows drilling down into details.
These are just a few examples of NetSuite capabilities that alleviate the burden of manual processes for finance teams. The time savings allow them to focus on value-added analysis, planning, audit support, and guiding financial strategy – the things that CFOs wish they had more time for.
Real-Time Analytics and Business Intelligence
Making decisions based on outdated data is troublingly common without centralized, real-time analytics. NetSuite enables finance leaders to monitor the pulse of the business with role-specific dashboards, reports, and self-service data analysis.
CFOs have graphical dashboards that combine financial actuals with projections, budget vs. actuals, profit margins, cash management metrics, and more. Drilling down into reports provides transaction-level details behind summary numbers.
With self-service analytics, finance teams can easily access data, visualize insights, and find answers on the fly. This agility empowers them to explore trends and model different what-if scenarios to provide input into critical decisions. The business intelligence capabilities in NetSuite include:
- Interactive dashboards with multiple report types
- Drag-and-drop reporting with drill-down to transactional details
- Real-time key metric monitoring
- Ad hoc analysis and pivoting
- Formulas, forecasting, and trend analysis
- Visualizations including charts, graphs, and maps
With ERP, CRM, ecommerce, inventory, and HR data unified on a single platform, NetSuite also enables finance to analyze correlations that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to recognize. This results in deeper cross-functional insights that can enormously benefit decision making for the C-suite and line of business leaders.
Why Choose SuiteRep?
Selecting the right NetSuite implementation partner is almost as important as choosing the right solution. SuiteRep is a NetSuite solution provider and implementation specialist with deep experience across many industries.
A full lifecycle partner, SuiteRep can not only implement NetSuite but also provide ongoing managed services to ensure you get the maximum from your investment. The SuiteRep team helps finance leaders to:
- Develop future-state process maps aligned to business objectives
- Architect a unified cloud platform to support scale and growth
- Perform complex multi-entity and global consolidations
- Build advanced analytics with machine learning and AI
- Create intuitive real-time reporting and dashboards
- Continuously innovate solutions after implementation
With robust NetSuite managed services, the SuiteRep team essentially becomes an extension of client finance teams to keep systems optimized. This frees in-house staff to focus on key initiatives moving the business forward rather than getting bogged down in technology management.
The Bottom Line
NetSuite provides an agile foundation to transform finance. Unifying disconnected systems onto a single cloud platform gives CFOs complete visibility in real-time. Automated processes boost efficiency while role-based analytics empower leaders with timely insights to drive strategy.
Choosing SuiteRep helps ensure a successful implementation, adoption, and continuous evolution of solutions tailored to evolving needs. With the power of NetSuite and the partnership of SuiteRep, CFOs and finance teams can achieve digital transformation to guide better business decisions.
