NetSuite ERP 2020 Release 2 Helps Professional Services Prepare for Change and Manage Hybrid Workforce Models

miOver recent years, Professional Service firms including Netsuite partners, faced continuous challenges to long, complex projects from increasing competition and changing client requirements.

Like every business, Professional Services firms are looking to reduce operational costs while increasing their bottom line.  To achieve these goals, the elimination of manual data entries, disparate project management systems, information silos, and gain control over budget and expenditure.  With increased insights into the improved work lifecycle, NetSuite 2020 Release 2 helps professional services firms evaluate the impact on projects and plan for business model evolution and other transformations.

With 2020.2, professional services businesses can more efficiently and effectively control and enhance long-term projects, create hybrid work-from-home business models and still achieve financial and operational excellence.

Project Lifecycle Optimisation

• For increased budgeting accuracy, revenue budgets can now be calculated based on quantity and rates pulled in from rate cards, items and billing. The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) allows users to save a template for faster and easier WBS budgets creation for future similar projects. These templates are a time-saving mechanism for companies that are responsible for managing similar and multiple client projects.

• A pre-built integration to Oracle Content and Experience (OCE) provides a full-featured content platform that is directly accessible for strong document management and effective collaboration. Users upload project-related files directly on the project using the system-generated OCE folders which allows users to search, collaborate and share project documents, images, video, code and other digital assets via a single, secure project file.   

Continuous Employee Engagement

• Expense report credit card integration lets users upload directly from their American Express corporate credit card accounts to complete the expense lines directly, thereby streamlining the process, increasing user adoption, and reducing data entry errors.

• Expense report control automations and notifications ensure the compliance to company policies and contracts resulting in lowering the unapproved overages while limiting excess expenses.

Financial and Operational Excellence

• Invoice grouping allows you to consolidate multiple invoices into a single customer invoice. Payments can be accepted at the group level and applied to individual invoices. This new function reduces manual grouping, ensures invoice accuracy while improving cash flows by decreasing days invoices are outstanding.

• The new net intercompany receivables and payable function enables users to offset mutual intercompany open balances and auto-generate intercompany netting settlements.

• Finance teams can spend many days per month posting, matching and reconciling intercompany transactions. With cross-charge automation, transactions can now be posted for cross-subsidiary fulfillments —a time saving feature for intercompany financial statements verifying.

Intelligent Cash Management

• The Sequential Liability SuiteApp, enables the Finance team to gain a unified AR, AP and Cash in Bank report that supports the monitoring and payment of vendor liabilities after receiving payment for related customer project transactions. This function allows the finance team the ability to manage cash and maintain good vendor relationships, while collaborating with project managers on AR and AP client work balances in real-time.

• Streamlining bank reconciliations with the added ability to automatically create and post transactions directly from imported bank data, greatly reduces the manual time to process and match bank data to books.

These are just the highlights; there’s much more for Professional Service firms in NetSuite 2020 Release 2 than what has been covered here. For more specifics on the complete list of new features, be sure to read the Release Notes 2020.2