Over the years, our webinars on upgrading from QuickBooks to NetSuite have been extremely popular among organizations that have outgrown QuickBooks and are looking for a more agile, multi-functional and future-proof solution to support growth.
A recent live webinar, “Are QuickBooks and Manual Processes Holding Back Your Growth?,” (opens in new tab) was no exception. Attendees tuned in to learn about migrating from QuickBooks from NetSuite experts and Jay Oliphant, Corporate Controller at NetSuite customer Ecoark Holdings, a multi-subsidiary company that offers technology solutions for efficient, eco-friendly supply chain and logistics operations.
In his presentation, Oliphant addresses common questions that customers ask about NetSuite functionality. Like many QuickBooks users, Ecoark struggled with limitations in reporting, auditability, inventory control and customizations. Since going live on NetSuite, Ecoark has efficient automation, financial consolidation across seven subsidiaries and deep visibility to make informed, data-driven decisions.
“Our executives love the NetSuite dashboards,” Oliphant said. “Through the dashboards, NetSuite lets them do reporting on real-time data and drill down to understand what’s going on across the business.”
Throughout the presentation, attendees were able to ask additional questions of NetSuite and Oliphant, many of which often come up from QuickBooks customers evaluating NetSuite. We’ve packaged up a Q&A on the top nine questions we heard at the webinar.
Q1. What about NetSuite availability, performance, security?
With an enterprise-grade redundant infrastructure across multiple data centers, NetSuite uptime has averaged 99.96 percent over the past five years. Every day, NetSuite takes in more than 9 terabytes of new data and handles more than 500 million application requests.
As Oliphant noted, “Ecoark has never had a problem with downtime whatsoever. Performance has been excellent and we’ve never had any issues with security.”
As for security, NetSuite supplies world-class application and operational security based on National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and ISO 27000 series of standards. Among the many measures are fully guarded data centers, 128-bit SSL encryption and support for a host of audit and security standards, including PCI-DSS, and SSAE 16 (SOC 1).
Q2: Are the ecommerce functions PCI compliant?
Absolutely. As a registered PCI-compliant service provider, NetSuite eliminates the need for merchants to store or handle credit card data. NetSuite goes a step further in offering 3D Secure credit card authentication, also known as Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode. Additional fraud prevention measures are in place through NetSuite partnerships with credit card processors CyberSource and Merchant e-Solutions.
Q3: Can we customize roles?
Yes. NetSuite provides many standard roles with predefined permissions in accounting, sales, analytics and other common uses; standard roles are also included for partners and customers with system access. Administrators have the flexibility to restrict or expand permissions by individual at a highly granular level, improving both productivity and security. In addition, individual users can customize their dashboards around the tasks and information they use most frequently.
Q4: What is the shortest implementation time possible? (For a small manufacturing company).
The SuiteSuccess program is designed to get customers from “zero to cloud” in 100 days. SuiteSuccess leverages deep, industry-specific expertise of NetSuite Professional Services for a fast and agile deployment. As noted in the demo portion of the webinar, 47 days is the fastest SuiteSuccess implementation. Apart from SuiteSuccess, use of NetSuite Professional Services or third-party consultants will typically deliver faster, better results.
Q5: How would I look at something by brand?
NetSuite allows you to create an unlimited number of reporting dimensions. Out of the box, NetSuite offers several dimensions that may be used for reporting by brand. If brand is equivalent to a product line, you can simply rename our out-of-the-box product line dimension to "brand."
If brand is geared more toward a specific business unit or entity, we also have built-in dimensions that accommodate that, such as subsidiary, class, location, etc. Or, you can create a new reporting dimension for brand in just minutes using our visual interface, with no coding or software customization required.
Q6: Does NetSuite allow for cost accounting for manufacturing facilities?
Yes. Out of the box, NetSuite supports seven different inventory costing methods — standard, average, group average, FIFO (first in, first out) and LIFO (last in, first out), specific and lot-numbered. Standard costing is especially useful for manufacturers with fast-changing inventories and associated costs, and enables you to track variances between expected and actual costs to revalue goods accordingly.
Q7: Can you see the currencies totals without subsidiaries, just a single company in one country?
Yes. From a consolidated financial statement, NetSuite provides drill-down by any number of dimensions, including viewing a single company in its base currency, or the currency you select. Similarly, you can report on groups of subsidiaries, or subsidiaries within a country or region. Support for more than 190 currencies in NetSuite OneWorld gives you flexibility to transact and report in the currencies that make sense for your business.
Q8: We are a smaller restaurant group — is this too large of a product for us? It seems so versus QuickBooks online.
NetSuite is in place in many restaurant groups, from small local operations to multinational global brands. In fact, many smaller groups have upgraded to NetSuite after struggling with manual processes and systems limitations in QuickBooks. They have gained new flexibility and efficiency with a future-proof solution to handle financials, multi-location inventory, seamless reordering of goods and more.
With its roots in serving small and midsized business, NetSuite is used by many organizations with only a few dozen employees or less. If you’re in the market for a new solution for restaurant operations, it pays to do a detailed evaluation of QuickBooks versus NetSuite for both your present-day and future needs.
Q9: Do those external email notifications include HTML formatting?
This question refers to portions of the demo that showed how to use NetSuite to automate email distribution of income statements or other financial reports to investors or a board of directors, or to automate dunning emails to customers delinquent in their payments. The answer is yes — NetSuite’s email interface offers flexible HTML formatting, or users may choose to use plain text.
Learn more by downloading a white paper on making the switch from QuickBooks to NetSuite
