Setup Manager

One of the biggest selling points of NetSuite, is not just how much it can be customized, but how easily it can be customized. I have seen, and know people who work with, other systems that literally require a reinstall to do things NetSuite allows you to do with the click of a button. In this chapter, and in this video, we are going to cover some very light setup, administration, and customization options. This all starts with the Setup Manager. Before we dive in though, I want to make it clear that covering everything in detail is enough subject matter to fill several courses. For this reason, we will not be covering all that much, but we will cover some of the more common tasks. Well, and also because this is an introductory course. To get to the setup manager we go to Setup and click Setup Manager. The first thing we see is the Welcome to the Setup Manager greeting. Under it are some links to helpful documentation. For example, we can find overview information about Company Setup. The same goes for CRM Setup, and the rest of the options below. If we know what we are looking for, or close to what we are looking for, we can search for it here. If I type features and click search, I get several options. I also get the paths to each of these options. We can click Setup Tasks, to get back to the accordion style menu we were just looking at. I can click and expand Company and I have a whole list of other options to choose from. These options are the same as if I went to Setup and Company here in the menus. The only difference is that opening the options through the menus opens it in full screen. Opening using the links to the left, opens the option in the right-hand panel, and improves navigation. Let’s click on Company Information. In this pane we have access to set lots of general information about our business. We can change the Company Name, or Legal Company Name if we need to. We can also change the state in which we operate. This state can be different from the state we have in our address. Up at the top, here, we see our Honeycomb company logo. We set this with these two logo fields. This is also where we set our logo for forms and other printed documents. So, if your company logo changed, maybe due to a rebranding effort, this is where you would make the change. Scrolling down a little bit, we have our generic return email address. This email address is usually the user who first setup the system. This is used as the return address when emailing scheduled reports, saved searches, and forms, among other places. Over here to the right we have our account ID, which is needed when contacting NetSuite. Above that, we have a drop down allowing us to setup our first fiscal month. For most companies this is January, but for some it might be a different month such as July. The time zone allows us to set our primary company time zone. This is usually the time zone where headquarters is located. Down a little further we have our company addresses. I actually don’t have a shipping and return address filled in, but if I want to set this up, here is where I would do it. If we click edit for the primary address, we get this popup. Inside the popup we can set things such as our phone number and address. This is all fine, and I don’t want to change anything, so I can just close it with the X up here. If I had made changes I would have clicked OK to save them. To the right of the address information, we have System Notes. These system notes will tell you if any changes have been made to the company information. The changes only show after having saved them though, so if you added or changed information, but had not yet saved it, it would not show up here. In our case we have not changed anything, so there are no notes. Next let’s take a look at Enable Features. In this view we can enable or disable many global features of NetSuite. There are far too many options to cover them all, but we will cover some of the more useful ones. Departments and Locations are dimensions that are pretty straight forward to most businesses. Classes however can usually mean whatever you want them to mean. For this reason, it is not always clear how they should be used. I have seen different departments at a company argue about who should be in charge of classes, and what they mean as well. Some of the better implementations I have seen or heard of, turn off classes by default, and come back to them later after some time using NetSuite. They also usually rename these to be something meaningful. If you wanted to turn these off, this is where you would do it. If you track inventory using multiple units of measure, this is where you would enable it. For example, a beer brewer might brew beer in batches, store it in kegs, and sell it in kegs and bottles. If you are ever curious about what one of these items means, you can click the title, and a help snippet will show up on screen. Use deleted reason allows you to force users to enter a reason when deleting a transaction. This makes sense for a lot of businesses, but I recommend turning this on in a sandbox first, deleting several different types of transactions, and seeing how it works. In most cases, I recommend enabling or disabling features in a sandbox, unless you are entirely sure what you are doing, and what other ramifications the change may have. We also have other tabs that allow us to make changes to our Accounting preferences and Tax settings. Further over we have Transactions then Items and Inventory, followed by other settings tabs. I recommend taking some time to go through each of these on your own, reading what each of the settings does. Most of these preferences are setup during the initial NetSuite implementation, and never touched again. This works okay for many businesses, but knowing what you can change goes a long way to making NetSuite work the way your business works. This is as opposed to making your business work based on how you have NetSuite configured. We have another option here, to the left, to Rename Records. This is used to label NetSuite records the same as how you refer to them in your business. For example, maybe you tend to call vendors, suppliers. You could change that here. Or maybe you call cases, support cases, or tickets, or issues. This is where you would change it. This is also where you would rename the class dimension that we looked at just a moment ago. Under General Preferences we have options to set how things are formatted. For example, the date format I have up here is fine for the United States, but in Europe, and much of the rest of the world, this might be better set to Day, then Month, then Year. Likewise, most of Europe uses a 24-hour time format, and that could be set here. If your first day of the week falls on a day other than Sunday, you could select that here. This is sometimes done in industries that have their busiest times during the weekend, such as food service and retail. If we scroll down, we have options to set if certain defaults are allowed to be overridden by the user. One of the more important ones is Customer Credit Limit Handling. If you want to enforce sales order holds when a customer has exceeded their credit limit, and you don’t want sales reps to be able to override that hold, you would uncheck this box. If we scroll down in our left-hand pane, we have a section dedicated to transaction and record classification. This is where we can add new departments, locations, or other classifications. If we click new location, we are taken to the new location entry form. Here we could enter the new location as well as other information about it. Under the Accounting Section, we can enter data such as our opening balances. We can scroll down to our chart of accounts, where we can create new financial accounts if we need to. Of course, this is just a small amount of what the accounting section has, you should go through and explore the rest of it on your own. There are also many other sections such as Sales, Marketing and Support that we didn’t even get a chance to look at. I also encourage you to explore these on your own. There is far far more to the Setup Manager than we were able to cover here. But this should at least give you a starting point for common NetSuite settings.