Documents Overview

It would be great if all your companies’ data could be easily accessed through one system. The reality is that you probably have data sitting out on shared drives, google docs, intranets, and other locations. While NetSuite is not a document storage platform per se, you can use it to attach critical documents to records they pertain to. As an example, you might attach a scanned copy of a signed purchase order from a customer to the sales order that was generated for it. Or, you might attach a contract to a customer. In this way, you can find critical documentation more easily using a single system of record. In this video we will take a look at how to do just that. The first thing we need to do is open a record we can attach some documents to. I’ll use a customer for this demonstration, but the steps are the same for almost every record type. Let’s use this first, Colorado Rockies, customer. Let’s click edit. We do need to be in edit mode for most of this to work. Let’s scroll down and click the Communication subtab, then the Files subtab. If we had any files that were already attached to this customer we would see them here. We don’t have any, but we’ll change that soon enough. If we know a file already exists in our NetSuite file cabinet, we can attach it by clicking these dropdown arrows, then selecting list. Prior to this video I uploaded a contract that we can attach, and I’ll show you how I did that in a moment. Let’s search for Colorado Rockies in the search box. This is searching through all the files we have in our file cabinet. Had we searched for contract instead, we would have had many more results. Let’s select this one by clicking it. Now we can click Attach and the document is connected to the customer. Because this file exists in the file cabinet already, it is attached to the customer only after we save the changes. After clicking save, we are dropped back at our customers list. I’ll go ahead and open the same customer again, because I want to show you a couple of other ways to attach files. Let’s scroll back down to Communication and Files, and we’re back where we were before. We can open the contract by clicking on the name, and because this is a PDF, it will open in a preview window. Chances are good that the files you want to attach, are not already in NetSuite. Most of the time they will be on your local computer. There are two ways to attach files from your computer. The standard way that we will take a look at first, and the drag and drop way that we will take a look at in a moment. If we click New File, we get this file attachment dialog box that pops up. Most of the time attachments will be made from your own computer, but there is an option to attach files from the web. To attach a file from the web you will need the files full URL. This isn’t used that often though, so we won’t cover it here. We’ll come back to these name, and folder boxes in a moment. For now, let’s go ahead and select what we want to upload by clicking Choose File. We are now looking at what’s on our local computer. I put some documents on my desktop that we can work with, so I’ll navigate there now. Under Demo Files, we have several more contracts we can upload. Let’s go ahead and choose this contract two, and click open. This is now ready to be attached, but I want to cover a few more options in this window first. We have a character encoding option below. Normally you should leave this alone, however if you know that the document you are uploading uses a different encoding you might change this. If you are unable to open a document after uploading it, then this might be why, but this is rare. Normally you don’t want to touch this. We do need to select what folder we want our newly uploaded file to be placed into. I’ll go ahead and expand this dialog box a bit, so we can see the full folder path. I’ll scroll down and select where I want this to go, here in this 1906 folder. I’m choosing this because this is the customer ID, and I already have my folders setup in this way. The folder you pick will almost certainly be different. Coming back to the File Name. When we upload this, it will be uploaded using the same name it has on your computer. Usually this is what you want, but if for some reason you do want to rename it, this is how you would do that as it is uploaded. So, if I had just named this contract on my local computer, I might change the name as I was uploading it. These boxes over here to the right are for advanced use cases. Most of the time you will not need to use them. Let’s click Save and our file is uploaded and attached to the record. If you are looking at that process and think it’s a little convoluted, I agree. In fact, the folks at NetSuite agree too. That’s exactly why they developed the file drag and drop bundle. You may or may not have noticed this, when I loaded the record. If I scroll up to the top, I have this nice, Drop files here, area of the screen. This is because I have the file drag and drop bundle installed in my NetSuite instance, and it is configured to work with customer records. This is a free add-on software bundle that your admin can setup for your company if they choose to do so. If we come down here, I can open the same folder we were looking at earlier, when we were uploading contract number two. Let me go ahead and resize this, so we can see what is in the background as well. Now, if I drag and drop this third contract here, and let go. This does exactly what you probably think it does. This contract is now uploaded and attached to the record. In fact, not only is it attached, but it is also in the correct folder. If we scroll down, we see it here. One last save and we’re all done attaching files. Let’s come over to the file cabinet, by going to Documents, Files, then File Cabinet, and take a look at where the files we just uploaded went. If I expand this drag and drop files folder, then customers, then click on 1906, I can see everything we just uploaded. If you’re wondering how I knew to pick 1906. It’s because that is the customers Internal ID. This is based on how I have my instance of NetSuite and file drag and drop configured to save what I send it. Incidentally, this is why I chose the 1906 folder earlier when we were uploading the second contract. Now you know how to attach documents to records. In the next video we’ll dive a little more deeply into the file cabinet, which is where the documents reside.