Operational Reporting & Business Intelligence

The challenge

The operations and finance teams were spending significant time each week running NetSuite reports, exporting results to Excel, and reformatting the data before it could be shared with management. NetSuite had most of the underlying data, but the standard reporting tools didn't produce the cross-record summaries the business actually needed — particularly views that combined data from multiple transaction types or applied conditional logic that saved searches alone couldn't handle.

Requests for a new report or a modified view went into a queue and typically waited for someone with both the NetSuite access and the time to build it. By the time a report was ready, the data it contained was often several days old and the question it was meant to answer had already been worked around using spreadsheets.

What we built

We built a set of role-based dashboards and supporting saved searches tailored to each team's specific reporting needs. For operations, this included a real-time inventory position by location, open purchase order tracking with expected receipt dates, and a backorder report that flagged unfulfilled customer demand against current stock levels. For finance, we built a consolidated AR aging view, a cash flow summary combining open invoices and expected receipts by period, and an exception report for transactions sitting in a pending state past a configurable threshold.

Each dashboard was configured to the role so each user saw only the metrics relevant to their function without needing to filter or reconfigure the view on login. Saved searches were formula-based where possible to reduce query load and avoid the performance issues that come from running heavy searches on dashboards with frequent refresh cycles.

The result

Each team now has a dashboard that answers their recurring questions without building a report or waiting on someone else. The reporting that previously required weekly manual work is available at any point during the day, updated in real time from NetSuite's live data.

The finance team's weekly export process was retired. The operations team's backorder reconciliation — which had been a standing Monday morning task — was replaced by a dashboard view they could check at any time. New reporting requests, when they came up, were additions to an existing structured system rather than one-off exports built from scratch.