NetSuite releases two system upgrades per year to all accounts, often providing new functionality within existing features in addition to launching brand new capabilities. Prior to being upgraded to the new release, all accounts are given access to a release preview environment that allows users to preview the changes in a sandbox-like setting. Detailed documentation describing all changes that are included as part of the new release are also provided at this time and can be accessed from the New Release portlet and in SuiteAnswers.
In this post, I’m going to share the five changes that are being made as part of 2020.2 that I am most excited about.
- Employee Performance Management (Performance Reviews & Goal Management)
One of the key components of building a high-performing team is providing employees with consistent feedback and monitoring how that feedback impacts their performance over time. The latest addition to NetSuite’s HR module, SuitePeople HR, allows organizations to do just that. The Performance Management feature tracks performance reviews and provides the ability to set employee goals, and then ties the two together for a holistic view of each employee’s progress. One of the more exciting aspects of goal tracking is that it uses the data within NetSuite for real-time reporting on an employee’s progress toward their goal via native reporting.
- Expense Report Policies
The expense report functionality in NetSuite has long been an all-or-nothing capability, where employees are granted permission to enter expense reports in all categories within their defined limits. Release 2020.2 changes that, with significant enhancements to the restrictions that can be placed on what can be entered by whom and when. Using expense policies, managers can define applicable date ranges and distinct limits for particular categories and employees using filters. As an example, you can set up an expense report policy that will restrict the amount of travel meal expenses that can be entered for the sales department during September, or even cap the amount on a daily basis if desired. For added granularity, you can also associate an expense policy with a specific project, which will enforce contractual expense limits for all resources working on a project.
- Manufacturing Preferences
If you’ve been using NetSuite as your manufacturing ERP, you’ve likely noticed that the preferences that govern the various manufacturing capabilities are somewhat hidden. In order to review or change the manufacturing settings, a user would have to navigate to Setup > Accounting > Accounting Preferences > Order Management subtab. That cumbersome and unintuitive navigation path is gone as of release 2020.2, and a new Manufacturing Preferences UI is taking its place. Following the release, users will navigate to Setup > Manufacturing > Manufacturing Preferences. All previously-defined preferences will be mapped to the new Manufacturing Preferences page automatically upon system upgrade, so you will only need to navigate to this page when you’re ready to review or make changes to your manufacturing configuration. While this change doesn’t impact anything about the manufacturing functionality itself, I think it is a substantial and long-needed improvement in terms of the user-friendliness of the preference management UI.
- Invoice Groups
As companies that do business with government agencies or large corporations know, there are often stringent requirements for invoicing these entities that don’t necessarily align with how you actually ship and bill orders within NetSuite. This can even impact your cashflow, as issuing an invoice that doesn’t meet the provided specifications often results in delayed payments. Many of the ways that I’ve seen organizations meet these unique invoicing requirements involves one or more manual steps, but NetSuite is looking to make that process easier and more automated in release 2020.2 with invoice groups.
Invoice groups allow you to issue invoices in the way that best aligns with your internal business process, but then groups them together to match customer expectations. The individual invoices are still retained as distinct records, but the customer will instead receive invoices and statements that are consolidated by group based on your specified configuration. When payment is issued, you are able to process payment by group, with all individual invoices belonging to a group being selected automatically. To learn more about the invoice group functionality, I highly recommend reviewing Invoice Groups Management in SuiteAnswers.
- Installment Billing Tax Enhancements
In my opinion, installment billing is one of the hidden gems of native NetSuite. So many organizations that I talk to have requirements for installment billing and don’t realize that the capability to generate those installment transactions is already available to them out of the box – and it’s very easy to configure. Up until now, installment billing has had one major limitation, which was that all sales tax due on the invoice was included on the first installment invoice with no option to split it between all installments. Release 2020.2 fixes this limitation, allowing a tax preference to be configured on the installment term. You will now be able to indicate whether the tax should be split evenly or paid upfront when creating the installment term.
NetSuite release 2020.2 is filled with upgrades and updates that have been on my radar for some time, so I’m really looking forward to our scheduled release date. Beyond what I’ve already mentioned above, there are many, many other features worth checking out, including the required deposit workflow, vendor prepayment approvals, and enhancements to the personal information removal tool, just to name a few. If you haven’t yet reviewed the release notes, you can download them here.
Want to learn more about NetSuite release 2020.2? Contact Concentrus today to discuss the new release and learn more about the changes that will impact your business.
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