Custom Project Performance Dashboard

The challenge

The client's project managers were rebuilding status reports manually before every stakeholder meeting. NetSuite had the data — actual hours logged, budgeted effort by phase, remaining work — but it was spread across Projects, Tasks, and Time records with no way to see all three together without exporting to Excel. By the time the spreadsheet was ready, the numbers were already a few days old.

The team had tried using standard NetSuite reporting, but the built-in tools couldn't join these record types in a single view. Managers were spending time before each meeting reconstructing a picture that NetSuite already had the raw data to produce.

What we built

We built a set of formula-based saved searches comparing budgeted hours to actuals at both the project and task level, pulling from the three record types NetSuite's standard reports couldn't join cleanly. These fed into a role-based dashboard with portlets showing current budget health across the active project portfolio, a red/amber/green status indicator driven by percentage consumed versus percentage complete, and a list of tasks approaching their budget ceiling.

We also added a drill-through view so project managers could click from the portfolio summary into individual project detail without leaving NetSuite. The dashboard was scoped to the Project Manager role so each manager saw only their own active projects by default, with an admin view available for portfolio-level oversight.

The result

Project managers could see the budget status of every active project in one view the moment they logged in, instead of spending time before each meeting rebuilding a spreadsheet. Overruns became visible while there was still runway to act — not after the project had already blown its budget.

The time spent preparing for status meetings dropped significantly. The dashboard became the default starting point for project reviews rather than a spreadsheet assembled the night before.