There’s no question that companies have more data than ever. Technology has allowed reporting teams to generate incredible insight into company performance, creating huge demand for timelier, high quality reporting. And let’s face it, converting insights into something that can meet management and board presentation standards is no small feat. Finance teams typically spend days manually stitching together data in Excel via massive exports that often become outdated as soon as they share them. So how can finance teams more effectively take their analysis and create accurate, high impact reports?
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting Smart View for Microsoft Office can solve these challenges. It gives users the tools to build and publish flexible, highly formatted and refreshable financial and management reports with drill-down and drill-back capabilities to data in NetSuite ERP within the familiar confines of Microsoft Office applications. For example, Smart View’s ad hoc analysis allows users to retrieve data from NetSuite Planning and Budgeting and analyze it in Excel spreadsheets.
“Everyone loves Excel. Planning and Budgeting Smart View feels like Excel, but it’s able to connect to NetSuite and isn’t a burden to maintain,” said Karen L. Crow, VP of Finance, Arbor Research Collaborative.
Smart View capabilities include:
- Ad hoc or Free-form Analysis
Flexible access to an organization’s data in a secure, permission-based environment allows users to quickly get and use important business data and metrics. Users across the organization can use Excel to interactively and dynamically investigate data extracted from NetSuite or other sources.
- Report Design
Smart View’s financial and management reporting capabilities allow an organization to display NetSuite data in highly formatted Excel, Word or PowerPoint views. With the data accessible in Office applications, users can create reports as needed, combining different data types from NetSuite.
- One-Click Refresh
With Office, users can create comprehensive reporting packages, which can be refreshed with a single click. For example, the format of a board book stays largely the same every month or quarter, but the data points need to be refreshed and the narrative needs to be updated, Smart View refreshes these reports with a single click, meaning users can update it even minutes before a board presentation.
- Predefined Form Interaction
Users who prefer to leverage predefined input/ reporting forms find Smart View a convenient way to interact with and consume data via Office applications. These users are often in operational or other non-finance roles across the company and prefer to work in Excel, Word or PowerPoint when it comes to analysis and reporting. Data can be seeded in predefined forms leveraging user-specific permissions and dynamic data refreshes.
- Pre-Created Content Access
Data forms can be designed and organized in a way that supports user-friendly navigation and consumption of content. Users may access prebuilt content — for example, double-clicking in Excel, Word or PowerPoint to open dynamically linked tables, charts or grids — for use in their own calculations, documents or presentations. These grids can be further customized and saved for future reference by others.
Easily Create Ad-hoc Reports in NetSuite Planning and Budgeting Smart View for Microsoft Office
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting offers comprehensive integration with Microsoft tools such as Excel, Word and PowerPoint using the capabilities of the Smart View for Office add-in. Users can leverage Excel as their modeling environment and slice and dice data using Excel-based ad hoc analysis. Common planning actions, such as spreading and allocation, are available within data grids. Additionally, users can directly integrate data from NetSuite Planning and Budgeting into Word and PowerPoint to create reports. This allows users to create highly customized documents and presentations with accurate information. Users can automatically refresh the report when the underlying data changes. That reduces manual intervention, improves data integrity and increases reporting accuracy. Simply put, with NetSuite Planning and Budgeting Smart View, financial data users are able to retain the full capabilities of Excel while gaining NetSuite’s budget and forecasting capabilities.
Watch this product video(opens in new tab) to learn more about how to create ad hoc reporting in NSPB Smart View.