With the release of NetSuite 2024.2 Release 2, Oracle has included many new features designed to help companies optimize their business performance, including increased visibility into workforce costs, improved bill capture accuracy, and more banks that can be directly connected to NetSuite. One example: It’s now easier to visualize your whole order-to-cash workflow using NetSuite data to spot any cash inflow problems. These enhancements are focused on helping finance and accounting teams grow revenue, drive cost efficiencies, and steer the business forward.
Connect to more than 14,000 Financial Institutions
NetSuite 2024.2 lets businesses directly connect to more banks in the US and Canada. NetSuite’s partnership with a new financial aggregator allows connections to over 14,000 financial institutions. It also provides Open Authorization (OAuth) connections to over 700 banks, allowing for a stable, secure connection with less frequent re-authentication.
With this partnership, more NetSuite customers can connect their bank and credit card accounts to NetSuite through the Bank Feeds SuiteApp. Data flows automatically from the bank into NetSuite cloud accounting software, providing businesses access to benefits such as automated bank and credit card statement reconciliation with the general ledger and up-to-date financial data to make informed decisions about allocating cash.
Enhancements to SuiteBilling
NetSuite 2024.2 includes several new pieces of functionality in NetSuite SuiteBilling to ease subscription management. NetSuite SuiteBilling now includes prepay functionality. This allows companies with a consumption-based pricing model to charge in advance for services that customers can consume throughout their contract period. Subsequent invoices will inform the customer of the amount of prepayment remaining. If the contract requires the customer to keep a credit balance, NetSuite can be configured to replenish the prepayment automatically based on a minimum threshold.
This release also integrates NetSuite’s CPQ (configure-price-quote) solution with NetSuite SuiteBilling, allowing companies to include subscription items for products or services in the configuration process.
Integrating these two solutions makes them more cohesive and efficient and expands the types of configurable solutions available for sale.
More visibility into talent costs
Several new features in NetSuite SuitePeople help companies accurately track and manage workforce-related costs in real-time and improve compliance and employee productivity.
With this release, NetSuite SuitePeople includes a new integrated benefits partner, SimplyInsured—a platform through which businesses can provide employee health insurance. This integration means new hires and existing employees can log into SuitePeople’s employee center to sign up for health benefits. Any deductions are automatically taken from employee pay during payroll, and costs are posted to the general ledger for tracking. This reduces the hands-on work for tracking employee health insurance costs and gives financial leaders better insight into healthcare costs to make more informed workforce and benefits planning decisions.
NetSuite 2024.2 also includes enhancements to the NetSuite SuitePeople Workforce Management mobile app. Updates to the time clock functionality include a break completion reminder to help ensure employees take their entire break and new time fields to capture data such as location, job, project, and task. With more work details in an employee’s timesheet, finance teams can make better decisions about resource allocation.
New close task management capabilities
In this release, a new interactive task management feature in NetSuite Account Reconciliation builds on the close functionality already in NetSuite. This feature gives accounting teams a centralized place to create, assign, manage, and monitor tasks around the financial close.
The task management feature enables companies to close their books faster, ensures tasks are executed in the proper sequence, and reduces the time spent on handling exceptions. Calendars automatically roll forward from the prior-year reporting, eliminating the need for manual adjustments.
With an easy, intuitive way to manage the close checklist and monitor the progress of the reconciliation process, accountants have more time to focus on other critical tasks for the business.
Enhancements to invoice processing and payments
NetSuite 2024.2 contains several enhancements to make the vendor payment process run more efficiently with less hands-on work. Using NetSuite AP Automation, companies with multiple US subsidiaries can now automate vendor payments for each one and process vendor prepayments directly into the vendor’s accounts. Companies can also set a default expense account that automatically captures banking fees and charges.
The latest release also includes increased control and accuracy within NetSuite Bill Capture so companies can capture vendor invoices quickly with fewer errors. Users can now upload bills with up to 30 pages on the scanned vendor list bill page and delete failed uploads to help keep the scanned vendor bill list organized.
The review bill page in Bill Capture has seen several notable AI-powered enhancements. Improved matching technology compares additional values from purchase orders and alerts you to any variances. They have added subsidiary, vendor, and location logic to increase bill record accuracy. Users can now organize and filter the review bill page by custom segment, improving control and visibility.
Expands visibility into cash flow processes
NetSuite Analytics Warehouse adds new dataset collections—or subject areas—to visualize specific business processes in this newest release. This allows analysts to quickly build visualizations that capture each process from end to end and identify inefficiencies or other problems that must be addressed.
The first new subject area, order-to-cash, combines datasets for customer payment activity, customer refund, order fulfillment, and return authorization to analyze possible issues with cash inflows. The second, procure-to-pay, combines the item receipt, vendor bill, vendor payment activity, and vendor return authorization datasets to identify areas where cash outflows could be managed more effectively. With these new subject areas, companies can improve their visibility into critical business processes directly impacting cash flow.
NetSuite 2024.2 also introduces a user-configurable subject area called account analysis to give companies more flexibility in customizing financial information—without data augmentation. It aggregates accounting data for all transaction types, allowing analysts to easily compile valuable information—such as income, expense, and cost of goods sold—for regulatory and statutory reporting. It also can be used to create trend reports for different account types over time and to report on multiple subsidiaries and accounting books.
Additional features to maximize efficiency
In addition to the features listed above, the 2024.2 release also brings several new enhancements, including:
Part 2 of this mini-series will examine the various Manufacturing and Warehouse enhancements made as part of the Oracle Netsuite 2024.2 release.