What Your Finance Team Wants From NetSuite
Netsuite Diaries
NetSuite Is the Core, Not the Finish Line
NetSuite is the system of record. It houses your transactions, your general ledger, your vendor bills and customer invoices. It’s a critical, non-negotiable piece of infrastructure for any brand that’s scaling. But too many businesses make the mistake of assuming it’s also where the finance team does all of their work.
It’s not.
Day-to-day, your finance team doesn’t just need a ledger. They need visibility. They need flexibility. They need a way to answer the questions that come flying at them from across the business. “What’s our cash flow forecast for next quarter if we delay that inventory drop?” “What’s our net margin across the EU region, excluding marketing spend?” “Can we show a consolidated P&L across three entities for the board meeting tomorrow?”
These aren’t obscure, once-a-year finance questions. These are daily, often urgent, and highly specific requests that need to be answered quickly and clearly. And NetSuite, on its own, usually can’t keep up.
What Finance Actually Needs
The truth is, finance teams don’t want to build saved searches or trawl through tables. They want clarity. And they want to move fast.
They need systems that help them surface insights, not just data. That means things like rolling forecasts that can adapt with shifting targets. It means visual dashboards that don’t take an analyst a day to prepare. It means being able to see, in one place, the true performance of the business, without having to mentally stitch it together from six different reports.
It’s not that NetSuite doesn’t contain the information. It’s that it doesn’t present it in a way that’s useful in the moment. Finance leaders today are expected to play a strategic role. They’re not just managing risk, they’re helping shape growth. But when their tools force them to operate like data wranglers instead of decision-makers, that role becomes harder to fulfil.
“They don’t want to query data, they want answers they can act on.”
Where NetSuite Falls Short
It’s important to understand where the tension lies.
Its reporting capabilities are built around saved searches and static reports. Yes, you can get the numbers out. But by the time you’ve cleaned them, formatted them, and made sense of them, you’ve probably exported them into Excel anyway. And if you need to explain those numbers to someone else, whether that’s your CEO or your investors, NetSuite’s native dashboards don’t exactly help you tell a compelling story.
Forecasting, too, is where many teams hit a wall. Scenario modelling inside NetSuite is often more pain than it’s worth, requiring manual inputs and rigid templates. Most teams give up and revert back to spreadsheets because it’s faster, even if it introduces risk.
And then there’s speed. NetSuite is methodical, not nimble. Even a simple revenue breakdown by channel might take four clicks, two filters, and a coffee break. In a fast-paced environment, that kind of drag matters.
“Most finance teams still export to Excel. Not because they want to, but because they have to.”
To be clear, we’re not saying NetSuite is broken, it’s the opposite. NetSuite is an incredibly powerful tool, when used with the right processes and in combo with the right complimentary tools.
What Finance Teams Actually Use
If you follow the real workflows, you start to see the truth. The centre of gravity for finance teams has shifted away from NetSuite. It’s still the system of record, but it’s no longer the system of action (from a strategic point of view anyway). They’re using NetSuite day-to-day for book-keeping, organising data, accounting etc, But when it comes to the “strategic” side of business…
Most teams operate in Excel or Google Sheets for a reason. They’re fast, flexible, and familiar. But that doesn’t mean they’re enough. We’re increasingly seeing finance teams adopt tools like Mosaic, Solution 7, and other FP&A platforms that sit on top of NetSuite and actually help them do their jobs; planning, visualising, forecasting.
The more data-mature brands are layering on BI platforms like Looker or Power BI, giving finance and ops teams real-time visibility into the numbers. But for many brands, especially those in the messy middle of growth, these can feel like overkill. There’s a gap between what they need and what NetSuite gives them. And bridging that gap takes intent.
How to Bridge the Gap
This isn’t about replacing NetSuite. It’s about building the right scaffolding around it.
The best setups we’ve seen start with clean data architecture. That means designing saved searches that aren’t just functional, but also usable, naming conventions that make sense, formats that support downstream use, exports that can be scheduled and automated.
Then there’s the connector layer. Tools like Celigo or Boomi are worth the investment, not just because they move data, but because they eliminate rework. They allow finance teams to build flows once, and then trust them.
Most importantly, there’s mindset. You need to set expectations across the business. NetSuite is where the truth lives. But if you want speed, if you want insight, if you want to unlock the full potential of your finance team, you need to meet them halfway.
Closing Thoughts
NetSuite isn’t broken. It’s just not built for everything finance teams are now expected to do. It’s a powerful engine, but it’s not the dashboard, the sat nav, or the steering wheel. And that’s fine, if you design your stack with that in mind.
The most effective finance teams aren’t wasting time wrangling data. They’re spending their time where it matters; on analysis, insight, and decisions. They’ve stopped asking NetSuite to be something it’s not. And they’re winning because of it.