Saved Searches

In addition to reports, NetSuite also allows you to view and extract data using saved searches. As we talked about a few videos ago, saved searches are similar to reports, but have some uniqueness to them. Let’s go through creating one in this video. To create a saved search we go to Reports, Saved Searches, All Saved Searches, and Click New. You might have also noticed the New Search option, above the Saved Searches menu. While this also works to create one, the process is different and a bit more complex. So, we will stick to what we chose for now. Here we see a list of all the different types we could create. Searches can be based on entities, transactions or any number of other records. For this one, I will select transaction, so we can look through all of our transactions. This is also a good search to build and demonstrate from, due to the number of elements it has, that we can use. Similar to our report, the first thing I want to do is give our transaction search a name. I will go ahead and call this Sam’s Transaction Search. It is also a good idea to give this an ID, but you will need to check with your administrator to know if you have a naming convention or not. Before I do anything else, I am going to save this. I did this same thing with the report, but never really mentioned why. Basically, since NetSuite runs in a browser, there is always a chance, though it is slim, that the connection between your client and NetSuite’s servers will be interrupted. If this happens you are at risk of losing all the work you put in. To help mitigate against this, I like to save fairly often. The other reason I did this is because, when I am building reports and saved searches in real life, I like to make a change or two, and see what affect it had. Then I will go back, and make another change, and see what affect it had. This iterative approach makes creating the perfect report or search a lot easier, especially when you are just starting out. As soon as I save this, I am dropped back where I could create another saved search. Since I do not really want to create another one, I will navigate to Reports, Saved Searches, and this time click on All Saved Searches. Here I can find the one I just created. I am going to open it to view in a new tab, and open it to edit here. This way each time I make an edit and save it, I can refresh the results in the other tab. I can also switch between tabs as we build this, to find the data we are looking for. We could do this by previewing, but I prefer this method. Here in the header section we can do things like change the owner, and make this public. We can make it available as a list view, this means that the search can be used to list records in NetSuite. For example, if we had a customer search, we could make it available as a list view. Then when we went to Lists, Relationships, and Customers, we could select that search, rather than the default list view for customers. If we want to use this on our dashboards, like we talked about in chapter two, we could select to make this available as a dashboard. We have a few more options as well that we will not cover. Rather than go through these subtabs in a linear order, I am actually going to jump around them a bit, and this should make sense as we do it. Under results, I have the results that default in for this search. These are based on the type of search we selected earlier. If I click over to my other tab, we can see that the columns we have listed here, are the same as the data we have listed when running the search. The View/Edit, and the Internal ID, are just kind of here by default. If you are wondering what this asterisk is, this is telling me which line represents the header level for this transaction, and we will look at that, in filtering, in a moment. Let’s edit this a bit, and see if we can turn it into a useful list of our sales orders. First, let’s get rid of some fields that we really don’t need. We can do that by clicking on the field and selecting remove. We’ll get rid of the asterisk header field, the As-Of-Date, Period, Tax Period and Account. I don’t really need to sort this by anything other than date, and the rest of these options are fine for me, for right now. If you did want to change any of these you could though. Let’s save this, and in our other tab, let’s look at our results. This is closer to what I had in mind when we started, but there is still some work to be done, so let’s go back and edit this some more. Again, we can do this in our other tab, by selecting edit next to the search. Here in the criteria subtab, I want to set a few criteria, to limit what this is returning. The first thing I want to set is, Main Line to yes. This is the header or asterisk field I was referring to earlier. Basically, when running a transaction search, you will receive a line in the search for each line you have in the transaction. Plus, you will receive a line for whatever you have at the header level, or for the overall transaction. I am only really worried about the main line of the transaction though, so I will filter on this. Since I am looking for sales orders only, and this is returning all transactions, the next thing I will filter on is the transaction type, though it is listed here as just type. I can pick one or more of these by holding down the ctrl key. This is useful if I wanted a consolidated view, that showed sales and quotes for example, but for now I will just choose sales order. Type is fine as any of, though this could be changed to none of, to exclude certain types of transactions. I’ll click Set and my filter is added. If I wanted to summarize this, I could do that with this summarize tab, but I don’t need it for this. I’ll click save, and let’s take a look at our results. In our other tab, keep an eye on this total number here to the right. This will go down significantly, since we filtered out all the line level detail, and any transactions that are not sales orders. This by the way, is the total number of results we have with this search. Now we have a search that shows our sales orders, sorted by date, and what those sales orders were worth. But let’s see if we can make this report just a bit more useful. I’ll go back to edit our report, and if we click on this highlight subtab, we can setup highlighting. Let’s highlight transactions that are worth more than $10,000 in green. We can do this by clicking on the condition builder icon, and selecting amount in the filter that comes up. We’ll set the value to greater than 10,000 and select set. We can add more than one condition here, if we wanted to but this is fine for now, so I’ll click set. Now I can select a background color for this, and I’ll choose green from the color picker. You could also set a custom hex value here. We could add an image, change the text color, and do a number of other things as well, if we wanted to. My highlighting rule looks fine to me so I will click add. You can add multiple rules for highlighting, but the order matters. The first rule that the line matches is where it will take it’s highlighting instruction from. So, I could add another rule under this to highlight $5,000 transactions and it would work, but a rule for $20,000 transactions would not, since those lines would have already hit the $10,000 rule. You may remember that when we looked at the results, we had a drop down to select a page, based on a date range, but we did not really have a proper date filter. Let me click over there so you can see what I am talking about. It’s this date here. I want to add a date picker that we can use at runtime, and we can do that under the available filters subtab. If you are wondering, the big difference between filters and criteria is that criteria cannot be changed at runtime, whereas filters generally can. I’ll add date here as a filter, and I also want to select to show this in the filter region. I’ll add the line, and then save this again, and let’s go take another look. If I refresh the results we can see our highlighting has taken place, and we can filter based on date, here at the top. This is all I really want to do for this search, but I do want to cover a few more things about searches, so let’s go back over and edit this one once more. If I click on the audience tab, I can select the audience that will be able to access this. However, if the audience cannot access the underlying data that the search queries, it will either not work, or will return incomplete data. This may be okay, or it may not. Once I have selected at least one other person, role, etc. as part of the audience, I can also check this Allow Audience to Edit check box up here. I usually only do this if the search is shared with just one or two people. If you want just one other person to be able to edit the search, a better way to do this is to make them the owner of it. This is especially true if that person will be responsible for maintaining it. Under the roles subtab, I can do things to make this the default search for specific roles, if I want, at least for those users who can access it. Under Audit Trail, I can see any changes that were made to this, when they were made, and by whom. This is the same as what we saw in the reports. The execution log shows when this report was run, and who ran it. It also shows whether the data was exported or not, but this does not mean that someone couldn’t have copied the data out using another method. Search title translation is specific to setting this report up to be used in other languages. You might be thinking, hey wait, we didn’t cover the Email tab. That is because we will cover this in the next video on scheduling reports and searches. I do want to go back to the results, and look at a few last things. The first is that within these results, you can usually sort by any of the fields, just by clicking on the column header. So, I could sort this by name, for example. We also have the option to edit certain fields directly from here, by toggling the edit button to on. Mine is already set to on, but usually this will be set to off. Only the fields with a pencil next to them can be edited, but I could add a memo for any of these orders, if I wanted to, by clicking directly in the memo field. As soon as I type what I want, and click outside of the field the data is sent to NetSuite. I recommend leaving the edit box unchecked, unless you are doing something where you know you will need to edit results. It is far too easy to accidentally change something that should not be changed with this on. Lastly there is the ability to export this as a CSV file, Excel sheet, or PDF document. Or, to print or email this. Now that you have a good understanding of saved searches and reports, we can move on, to talk about scheduling, and automating them, which we will do in the next video.