NetSuite Gets GRC

October 26, 2016

Posted by Brian K. Taylor, Vice President, Compliance, NetSuite

The Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) landscape has been rapidly evolving over the last 18 to 24 months, with significant implications for NetSuite and our customers. We’ve seen accelerating adoption in public and public-bound companies, in upmarket and rapid growth midmarket companies, and in compliance-regulated companies, such as nonprofit and education. The PCAOB continued to evolve its position on areas such as reporting, and completeness and accuracy of sample selections, and more and more companies are coming off Jobs Act grace-periods. There’s also been a lot more attention and feedback from public accounting firms working across multiple NetSuite customers, which has presented exciting opportunities for open, frank, dialogues between NetSuite, customers, and their auditors.

We understand the vital role robust and scalable GRC capabilities play in compliance-focused customers’ success and growth. NetSuite is committed to providing enterprise-class compliance and control capabilities, as a core element of our market-leading cloud ERP(opens in new tab) platform. We are laser-focused on delivering the foundational GRC products and services you expect, supported by tools that ensure you’re able to rapidly and completely leverage those technologies, such as greatly expanded help documentation, new online and instructor-led training courses, presenting at industry conferences, webinars, and more.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on our GRC vision and strategy, recent and future product and service enhancements, leading practices, and highlighting some fantastic partner solutions that extend the suite in compelling directions. Today I’d like to share some recent wins from September, which was a big month for GRC at NetSuite; we held our inaugural GRC Audit Advisory Board and delivered of our first ever GRC-focused, three day, blended-learning training course to a combination of customers, audit professionals, and developer partners.

The advisory board was attended by a who’s who of global audit and advisory firm partners, and feedback from the participants was highly positive, both in terms of our recent efforts and forward looking plans, but also in terms of our GRC community building and enablement activities. Multiple participants expressed how amazing it was that we were able to bring together such a diverse group of audit and advisory leaders. Our success in doing so reflects the importance of this initiative to our customers and these firms, and is a testament to our internal GRC team that has worked passionately to build these professional relationships and trust.

This board now joins our existing GRC Customer and Partner boards, as an important element in our market/product validation and prioritization sounding board, while giving us the opportunity to drive education and empowerment into these communities. And on the subject of community, community and partnership are key elements of what we are trying to achieve in the GRC space. NetSuite, our customers, partners, and the audit and advisory professional firms all win or lose together here; we are driving towards a common goal of empowering our customers’ businesses through active communication, transparency, collaboration, and trust. In this regard, the advisory boards represent both opportunities for leadership and enablement.

Another important milestone is the recent completion of our GRC-focused training course. The course is an introductory guide to establishing and auditing controls in NetSuite. Whether you are a new employee at a customer, at NetSuite, at an advisory firm, or simply someone that is new to NetSuite or the GRC space, this training course helps accelerate your understanding and usage of the NetSuite tools available to you, whether setting and monitoring change management, access management, or internal controls over financial reporting (ICFR), or conducting compliance and controls audits. Additionally, the course serves as a great introduction to NetSuite in general and to some of our important GRC add-on modules and partner applications.

I’m excited to be able to share these recent milestones with our GRC community, and look forward to engaging with you more on our accomplishments and plans in this area.

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