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How To Cut Your Month-End Close Process in NetSuite by 20%

insightsoftware -
September 10, 2020

insightsoftware is a global provider of reporting, analytics, and performance management solutions, empowering organizations to unlock business data and transform the way finance and data teams operate.

Month’s end for the finance team generally looks like this: tediously working through complicated consolidations, waiting until all the entries are posted for validation to begin, and then exporting multiple reports to spreadsheets, which require reformatting and linking to be useful. Essential as month-end reporting may be, it’s a cumbersome process that finance teams must repeat 12 times annually.

The question is, does financial reporting have to be this way? Many teams accept long hours and repetitive data entry as a necessary evil, the hard work required to get a clear and comprehensive portrait of financial performance. What if there was a way to significantly streamline that process each month?

Kicking Month-End Reporting Into High Gear

How would you like to shave 20 percent off your month-end process, finishing financial reports faster, dedicating less time and staff to month-end processes, and spending more time on value-added analysis? Spreadsheet Server for NetSuite makes that possible. Spreadsheet Server puts an end to tedious, manual data dumps from NetSuite into Excel. With Spreadsheet Server, your users can now access dynamic, refreshable NetSuite data directly in Microsoft Excel.

NetSuite reporting has never been so easy. Spreadsheet Server optimizes the month-end reporting process to run efficiently and intelligently time after time. It is so efficient, in fact, that it’s less of a process and more of a resource to access whenever and for whatever reasons necessary. Imagine having all the insights that you and your team need from financial reporting with a fraction of the effort necessary to prepare those reports. Decision-making around finance and operations alike improves immensely when you use Spreadsheet Server to optimize your NetSuite reporting.

For NetSuite users struggling to get the insights they need from financial reporting or wanting to speed up the month-end reporting cycle, Spreadsheet Server for NetSuite is a better way.

Real Companies Optimizing NetSuite Reporting

Many companies struggle with financial reporting, regardless of their size, industry, or seeming financial savvy. The situation outlined earlier, of the finance team slogging through manual reporting processes and scrambling to get the numbers in on time, plays out in plenty of real-world offices.

Take the silicon manufacturer Pure Wafer as an example. It relied on pre-packaged templates to conduct NetSuite reporting. Although that worked adequately, the templates lacked the flexibility and efficiency that Pure Wafer needed to make NetSuite reporting something the company could really use to its advantage.

That changed with the implementation of Spreadsheet Server. Within one month of having this Excel-based NetSuite reporting tool up and running, Pure Wafer shaved a full day off its reporting process. According to the CFO, “I’m spending less time creating the reports now, and much more time actually analyzing the data with senior management to understand what it means.”

His experience isn’t unique. When Renaissance Learning, a Wisconsin-based educational software company, needed to replace an unsupported financial reporting tool, it chose Spreadsheet Server. A short time later, when the company also needed a new ERP, it went with NetSuite and was able to continue using Spreadsheet Server, leveraging the existing skills and knowledge already built up in the team. With Spreadsheet Sever, Renaissance Learning knew it would have exceptional NetSuite reporting (better than what the ERP alone could offer) from the minute the system went online.

With the right financial reporting solution in place, Renaissance Learning unleashed the full potential of its accounting data. As the company’s CFO puts it, “Once we had Spreadsheet Server and got the data set to look at the right parameters, we click update and it’s done.” With the month-end reporting process condensed down to a few seconds, the company gained a whole new outlook on finance.

NetSuite Reporting: An Urgent Concern

Adopting a better approach to NetSuite reporting offers significant advantages. The risks posed by inefficient, imprecise, or untimely financial reporting at this pivotal moment of pandemic-driven uncertainty are simply unacceptable.

Brainyard, the research arm of Oracle NetSuite, recently declared the CFO to be the “smasher of rose-colored glasses.” By that, they mean it’s the CFO’s duty to give the rest of the enterprise an honest and accurate picture of financial performance no matter how brutal it may be. Their point is that in this turbulent moment, companies need to be laser-focused on the reality at hand. Optimal NetSuite reporting is essential.

For companies that lack robust financial reporting capabilities (the kind that speed up the month-end reporting by putting finance in control of the process), the near future looks…unclear. With so many factors in flux, they’re scrambling to keep up with numbers jumping far outside historical norms. With so much up in the air in terms of regulations, relief efforts, and market shifts, they’re desperate for sound strategic insights but struggling to unearth them through financial reporting.

It’s impossible to prove that companies with good NetSuite reporting will make it through this moment better than companies that don’t. However, it’s hard to argue against that assertion too. At a time when companies need to do more with less, adapt on the fly, and avoid every unnecessary mistake, financial reporting will play a huge role. That presents decision-makers with a stark choice: continue with the NetSuite reporting they have, or pursue the NetSuite reporting they wish they had.

Witnessing Spreadsheet Server in Action

Claiming to cut 20 percent off the month-end reporting process is a bold statement, but what does this actually mean for the members of the finance team tasked with NetSuite reporting? To answer that question, we went directly to the source.

Join insightsoftware’s Director of Finance as he explains how his team used Spreadsheet Server internally to report over NetSuite data and reduced their month-end reporting process by 20 percent.

Key takeaways include:

  • How having access to up-to-date, drillable data throughout the close cycle enables reconciliation and integrity issues to be picked up and fixed sooner
  • Time-saving ways to report on complicated consolidations
  • How to reduce time spent reformatting reports in Excel, by empowering finance teams to do their own NetSuite reporting, without waiting on IT or your NetSuite admins
  • A faster way to create comparative reports to analyze multiple periods side-by-side within Excel

Watch this on-demand webinar today to learn more about what Spreadsheet Server can offer you and your team at month’s end.

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How To Cut Your Month-End Close Process in NetSuite by 20%

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