Name: From Data to Decisions: Accelerate Financial Reporting with Solution 7
Uploaded: 2026-10-16T02:34:08.497Z
Duration: 32 min 41 s
Description: From Data to Decisions: Accelerate Financial Reporting with Solution 7

Transcript for "From Data to Decisions: Accelerate Financial Reporting with Solution 7": alright. Welcome, everyone, to today's session with Rob from one Cloud X and my teammate, Andrew Bennett, from the partner organization here at Zone. We're delighted you could join us today, and we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about financial reporting and, end zone solution seven, that we have to augment NetSuite and, make that really easy for you. So we're very excited to have you all here today. Please keep it interactive. You can enter any questions you have into the chat box at the side of the screen there, and, Rob, Andrew, and I will be able to answer you in real time. Alright. Andrew, shall we, shall we kick it off? I think it looks like we've got a few people on board now. Great. So welcome, everyone. We're going to be talking to you today about our reporting solution, solution seven. But just a quick overview for those of you who maybe aren't familiar with Zone. Zone, Zone began from a single suite app, over ten years ago that solved a particular billing problem in NetSuite. But today, after a fair bit of r and d and quite a lot of acquisitions, we are much more than that. We are a full finance platform for NetSuite. We really pick up where NetSuite leaves off, and we bring AI and automation to, the accounts payable, to billing, to cash reconciliation, and reporting. So Zone is now an orchestration platform for all of your financial workflows in NetSuite from the first invoice you're sending out right through to the financial reporting services. So whether we're looking at quote to cash, procure to pay, or other finance processes that the team is working on, we have AI agents supporting you every step of the way. And our clients see stronger controls, better operating margins, and a much smoother and faster scaling because all of these workflows are orchestrated in a command and control center that's embedded inside NetSuite's codebase. So we'd be happy to talk to you about, all of our solutions, if you're interested. But today, we're going to focus on solution seven reporting, and, Andrew, I'll throw to you to, take us away with that. Awesome. Thank you, Scott. Appreciate that. Welcome, everyone. Good afternoon. Good morning wherever it is you are dialing in from today. What I wanna do is just start with a moment I think that a lot of people here on this call today might recognise and it's day three of the close. Okay? So picture the scene. You've exported the trial balance from NetSuite. You've rebuilt it in Excel. You've tied out all the schedules. You are nearly there, and then someone posts another journal, correcting journal of some sort. And every number that you've built is now actually out of date. So you export again, and then you rebuild it all again in Excel. And then that moment when all your numbers suddenly go stale, now that's where a lot of the close time actually goes. This isn't going into judgment or analysis. It's going into rework. If you think about it, that happens absolutely every month. And today, what I want to show you is that what that month looks like when the rework goes away. That means reports stay live, numbers that you can trace back to the source, answers to the next question on the spot, and budgets that go out and come back and tracked against actuals without anyone retyping a thing. And we're gonna start with what yourselves and your team will probably experience every single morning. Now before we get into going through where we're we're headed today, I just wanna actually understand where it is that you're all started. So hopefully, just post a poll out into the q and a now. So do have a look into the the q and a in the poll section there. And it's just gonna be really one quick question. What slows down your close the most? Just take a few questions and click whichever one hurts the most. So we've got exporting and rebuilding reports in Excel, rework after late journals or adjustments, chasing variances and reconciliations, or waiting on data from other teams. So let's have a look in there and see what we've got. K. Just give you a few more moments. Okay. Interesting. Alright. So it looks like some people chasing variances and a lot of people when it comes to the exporting and rebuilding the reports. Interesting. And and look. That's very much what we hear quite often and it's exactly what today's session is very much focused on. So keep that answer in mind because what you'll see is happen, it will come up more than once. And if the top answer was waiting on data for other teams then well, a lot of that waiting is actually really waiting on someone else's export as well. Okay? So keep that in mind as we go as well. So this is how we're gonna spend the next thirty minutes. First, we're gonna start off with a ready made workbook. We'll open up a finished workbook and refresh it on live next week data. And that's what your team will actually use every day. You'll get this workbook as an example set when you first implement solution seven. Then we've got the building blocks. I'm gonna show you the functions and lists that sit behind it so you can see exactly how easy is it to adapt and build your own using the Excel skills that you already have. Third, we're then gonna trace a number back to its source. So we'll take one figure, drill down through subsidiary location and class right down to the original transaction in NetSuite itself. Fourth, we're gonna go from live data to that next decision. What happens if someone asks you a question and you didn't necessarily plan for it? Well, we're gonna answer that with a pivot table with live next week data. And then finally, those of you with NSPB out there, we're going to look at budgets out and budgets back. We'll send budgets out to stakeholders. We're gonna write the proof figures back into NetSuite, and we're gonna finish with actuals against the budget and forecast. Okay? And let's start off with this workbook. Okay? So this workbook I'm gonna show you is what your teams are gonna open up every morning. And what I want you to watch for is one quick updating of the entire workbook with current NetSuite numbers. Here we are. Hopefully, that's all visible on your screen. Yes. Quick check. It looks like we're good to go. Okay. So this is an... A fully open workbook that you will get as that example set as I mentioned before. So you see across the bottom, this comes with a whole host of different spreadsheets and and templates available for you to further adapt. Now in this particular example, I'm just focused on my balance sheet here and all the information, all the data that you can see that's being sourced through has come from NetSuite. And there's just really one important thing that I want you to focus on in this first little vignette. It's that refresh button up at the top there. Just gonna hit refresh sheet and we're just gonna refresh just this one particular sheet. And I know what you're saying. You see the NA popping up on the screen there. You think maybe he's built it, but all that's actually broken it. Actually, all all that's happening is that solution seven is now going away to my live connection to my NetSuite environment and grabbing all the information that is filtered out based on the other criteria that we've got listed within this sheet here as well. So we'll see that refresh and update in a moment. And this means that on demand, all of that data you're working with, all the information that you're viewing is real time. And so therefore, you don't go through that entire export, rebuild, export, rebuild cycle. Alright. It's going through it and voila. There we go. So all of that data updated live so that we can make those right decisions. Okay. Simple as that. So one click. Every tab is current if you've refreshed that entire workbook. That's for any entity or period that you've got within your NetSuite instance. No exporting. No rebuilding. Always current numbers. So how does that workbook actually work? So in the next one, the demo I'm gonna show you now, I want you to watch out for a formula that feels like Excel that you already know and a list that maintains itself. Okay. So these are our building blocks of solution seven. So the first one just to point out for you here is that you can see we've got a pop out list. Up in the top of our solution seven shiny new ribbon that we get as part of our implementation, you'll see we've got a host of different lists and functions available to us. And in this example, we've got a pop up list that gives us an overall filter for that entire spreadsheet for all of our various different class and segmentation elements that we've got. In this example, I've just got it referenced by subsidiary. So I can get that drill down real time view into any data based on any of those dimensions. Maybe I wanna do it based on location. Maybe I wanna do it based on a date period, for the view that I'm looking at as well. So So all I have to do is just edit, change the value in there. I can even come in and also change date ranges. Probably not gonna see a huge amount of information populating back in this one, but let's just see what it is that solution seven brings back to us. So whilst that's doing that, that's the first of our building blocks. I'll list some functions that you can see up at the top there. And once this data is refreshed, all of the cell information and all the cell details that you can see in here, All of this information is being powered by our summary fields. And we can see that once this uploaded. I'll bring that back up for you. We'll take a look at the formula that sits behind it because there are two particular, formula that are quite powerful that solution seven now gives you access to. It's the joys of doing live demos with live data and connections into NetSuite. If it takes much longer, we'll move on. So I'll just give it another couple more moments. But what you will see is in our function box, we have two core formula. There's budgets and there are balances. In this example, it's just calling through the balance for each of those periods and the account cell that is referenced within the spreadsheet itself. Obviously, if you're looking at drawing through budgets, you'd look to draw through that budget formula for us as well. I'm just gonna leave that to continue to think away by itself. Let's wait for another application. Okay. We'll get rid of that then. Alright. Whilst we're waiting for that to wake up and figure out is it's next move... Okay. Let's move on. Okay. So what you would have seen there, if I'd actually able to bring up that formula field, were familiar formulas and lists that update completely and utterly on their own, and that's all it's gonna take to adapt or build a report. You select your own functions and your own lists from your actual NetSuite list data. Let's get it canceling out of there. Alright. Okay. So therefore, it just quickly updates before us. Alright. Let's move on from there because we need that data. Now if a report is only useful if the data behind it is trustworthy. So what I want you to do, watch for a second now, is watch for one of those particular numbers in that summary area broken down layer by layer until you're actually looking at the actual transaction that sits behind itself. Now to do that, I'm actually gonna move back up to our consolidated layer for for Honeycomb Holdings and further filter that information. Okay. And we will stick back with our 2025 data in here as well. Okay. Actually getting a little bit more of a a... An appropriate performance here based on, what you typically expect in the real world as well. Okay. So here is all of my data filtered. I can see this is great. I get a lot of information here. It's broken down into each of the different accounts I've got specified on the left, asset accounts, liability accounts, etcetera. But that's all very well and good. What if I wanna see the detail that lies underneath that as well? So example for our under positive funds in April, got quite a lot of money here that I need to get further understanding and accounting for. So doing a right click allows us to open up our solution seven drill down. And in this example, I first of all wanna see, well, because we're viewing things at that top consolidated level, I wanna see things broken down and what number was this number made up from a subsidiary standpoint. I can see that all of this is actually just referenced then now against Honeycomb Holdings manufacturing. Every time I do a drill down, it's gonna open out an additional drill down sheet for me so I can have that separate from the information I was previously viewing. Again, kinda helpful but not not enough information for us. So let's actually divide that detail down further by location. And so now we're really starting to get into the heart of the detail that we really need. And we can see, hang on a second, a vast majority of those transactions were were not actually referenced against a particular location. Curioser and curiouser, we need to drill down further here. Let's go down and take a look and see if there's any further designation by class. No class referenced on here either as well. And this, if you were drilling down through pivot tables, if you were just working through multiple workbooks and sheets of static data that you might have exported from NetSuite, even then, whilst you've built out all of that, this is where even that stage would typically end as well. But because we've got solution seven and we've got that direct link and integration into NetSuite, lo and behold, I can actually view that underlying transactional information that sits below all of that that top level data itself as well. And so how many times have you ever looked at a cell in a spreadsheet and wanted to be able to understand, well, what actually defines and makes that number up? This is that moment right here. So as you can see, I've got a list of cash sales and payments now broken down by individual transaction. You'll notice that a cursor over each different one is actually a hyperlink into that record in NetSuite. I did previously load this one up but there you go. You can see it straight away. It's popped up for us. And so now I get to see all the detail, all the information that makes up that particular number. Wonderful. Okay. So that was from summary to source with just a couple of clicks and with an audit trail that's built in natively. Every single number is going to be traceable. Alright. So let's move on then from live data onto the next decision. Now think about it. What happens when someone comes along and asks you a question isn't necessarily planned for? I suspect that's probably going to happen in in today's webinar as well. People are always trying to catch me off guard. We'll see. I'll give you a chance for questions later. But what happens if say someone comes along and says, I want you to go ahead and create a pivot table for me. Well, I need to actually understand what's what's all of our open purchase orders that haven't necessarily been posted, that is breaking down by classification. Well, maybe your first immediate thought is you need to use a little bit of your Excel wizardry. Let's take a look at how solution seven can actually make that a lot easier. So we'll go over to... Here we are. Alright. This time, we're going to start with a blank workbook. Alright. And what I'm gonna build here is that summary of purchase orders by class report. Now up in my pivot tables tab, you can see I'm going to select a summary command and this is gonna ask for your typical Excel arguments that you need to specify. What's the range of information that we want in here? So here in particular, I want all non posting transactions and I'm gonna include in it all of my sales orders and all of my return material authorizations as well, all of my RMAs. And then solution seven is gonna start gather... Process of gathering all of that information up for us. Now we need to start to specify all of our pivot table parameters. And those of you familiar with pivot tables should be seeing everything you would expect at this particular stage as well. So using the pivot tables fields menu overlay on the right hand side, I'm gonna make it so that it has a sum column added. And at this point, I'm gonna access the solution seven table elements of the pivot table and choose which columns we want to display. So here's the menu. I need to expand that further because I want some additional fields further down in this particular report. In In this example, I'm gonna want the full name of all the locations those purchase orders are against within our organization. K? So now that's been added into our selected columns. And there we go. Our location columns have now been added into our spreadsheet. I'll close my pivot table menu and give it a nice little logo on there and a and a title. Right? We have a fully dynamic with on demand pivot table showing purchase orders by class, and that was all just with a couple of clicks of the mouse. Alright. So new question answered on the spot straight away with no expert, no safe searches, and absolutely no waiting. So answers on demand. Okay. Alright. So one more poll before we get into our last little topic on today's webinar. I'm just gonna be looking at budgeting. I'm just curious as to those of you out there. So, I wanna know how is it that you are running budgeting today? So we've got four different options for you to choose from. We've got spreadsheets that are emailed around perhaps, maybe you've got a separate planning tool, maybe you do all of your budgeting directly in NetSuite, or maybe perhaps you don't run a formal budget at all. So let's just have a quick look in the polls there. Let's have a look. I'll give you a few more seconds to answer in there. Okay. So it seems like bit of a mixture. Some people email spreadsheets around. Some people are not actually running a a formal budget at times. Fair enough. Okay. Well, let's just very, very quickly then touch on the the budget side of things though for solution seven. I'm gonna call this one budgets out budgets back and then looking at how you're tracking. Because typically budget season means a lot of files, a lot of retyping. And so what I want you to see in this next little demo is budgets that are gonna go out to every stakeholder with a couple of clicks coming back into NetSuite and then we'll take a brief look at what that looks like from a variance view as well. Alright. So let's start with a budget template here. Another example of which you'll find absolutely free in your solution seven workbook. Now we here at, Honeycomb Manufacturing, we do our budgets by location. So in this example, I've got one stakeholder that manages multiples of these budgets. But the example I'm gonna show you works equally well when you've got multiple stakeholders as well. We're gonna generate individual workbooks for each location and then we're gonna send them out to our stakeholder. They're gonna receive those via email and then they can open each of those, edit their budget numbers for the period that we've specified, and then we'll send them back to us as well. And then we're gonna do a very quick upload of that data back into NetSuite all without actually having to be within NetSuite. So I'm gonna use my locations pop up list on the left hand side. You can see we've got this budget already filtered by the San Francisco location. Alright. I've got an automation worksheet set up with this budget that gives solution seven all the ownership rules for the location workbooks that I'm gonna create. So we'll come back into our budget. And now we're gonna filter across from San Fran to our next location which is Boston. And each of those locations, you can see across the bottom is they're actually creating its own little template, our own little... Our own workbooks are gonna be created from. And so then up at the top of the screen in our solution seven ribbon there, you're gonna see we've got our automation menu. And so I'm gonna select email sheet from within that. And this gives me a predefined template in a pop up window. Now solution seven knows both of these actually need to go to my colleague, Miles. So I'm gonna send them to him by clicking okay. And this is what that will look like when it goes out to Miles. And there we go. So those budgets have gone out for Miles to update very easily. So what does the other side of that look like? How do we get all of that updated data back into solution seven and by extension NetSuite itself? So back again with our budget template, we need to ensure that the workbook range has been defined before we upload those updated budget workbooks from our stakeholders. And so here in our budgets and forecast menu, you can see in solution seven, you see it's telling solution seven where the budget values are in your actual worksheet and what each part means to NetSuite. Okay? So the upload knows exactly what it is it needs to send. Now you don't move or change any data in this particular step. You're just actually creating a map between your layout and NetSuite's budget record. So I've got my subsidiary value selected. In the values area, you're gonna have a a grid of numbers that you need to upload across as well. Then we've got for the periods, is it gonna be the columns which are gonna form each by different months? The accounts, which column will range holds the general ledger accounts themselves as well. Then you've got budget category. This is how NetSuite will allow you to store multiple budgets. You can keep a budget alongside things like a forecast or a q2, q3, q4 version, so on and so forth. And then the other dimensions that you've got available to you beyond things like subsidiary, you've also got other classification segments as you traditionally use like department, class, location, or even actually custom segments as well. One thing to note that once you've got a custom segment that's been enabled for budgeting, it does appear in the map worksheet menu as well underneath a particular area called operational fields and segments. So it's something that people tend to miss out on. Okay. So we've defined our worksheet range. Let's now upload that data back into NetSuite. So we've got all the open workbooks that I've received back from Miles that he filled out for us. So I'm gonna select all of those to upload. We're gonna click okay. And that's now successfully uploaded into NetSuite. Now all those budget numbers from Miles would have flowed back into here into our NetSuite budgets themselves. And the impact of all of that can now be tracked in another workflow... Worksheet tab if you want to in very, very granular detail using a variance report. All Excel based, all powered by solution set. Okay. So that was the the whole budget cycle in one workbook with actuals against plan on the same live data. So you can plan, then you can track. Alright. So what do we see? We started off with skipping the build and starting from that ready made workbook. So you can start day one with that finished workbook that runs on that live NetSuite data. Open it, refresh it when you're working with current numbers. And that's what your team's gonna be using every day and you'll get that full workbook as an example set when you implement solution seven. Next, we have the building blocks. We have the functions and lists which didn't entirely 100% work. But the idea behind those is so that you can adapt any report to your business in the Excel skills that you already actually have. You're gonna have those familiar formulas that are gonna pull NetSuite data by subsidiary, by period, by... They also have dynamic lists. You can bring in new accounts completely and utterly on their own. We then have tracing our number back to any source so you can answer what makes up this number in seconds. You can go from a summary figure through subsidiary location class right down to the original NetSuite transaction, and that, of course, is gonna give you a point of view a clear trail. We then went from live data to the next decision so you can answer the next question as soon as someone asks it. Pivot live NetSuite data in any way you need, things like purchase orders, by class, by location in minutes. And that's all without exporting, building a safe search, or waiting on IT. And then lastly, we have budgets out and budgets back. So you can run the whole budget cycle from one workbook and see the result. Templates go out to stakeholders in one click. Approved figures go straight to NetSuite, and the variance sheet that you saw at the end there will show actuals against budget and forecast on the same live data. Alright. So just to finish things off then, just to highlight a couple of the additional key benefits. Now this is a very, very simple straightforward self install process that will provide you with some very, very quick wins and on top of that very, very substantial return on investment in that respect. In particular, you're gonna get significant time savings in your month end close and the preparation of reports overall in general. And don't take my word for it. We've got over 1,500 customers live with Solution seven across the globe. And we've got a whole host of very many happy reviews on the Suite App Exchange as well if you wanna go and check that out. Now a few things to take note of. There are a couple of prerequisites. You will need to make sure as part of your installation process that your NetSuite role is configured with the correct level of data access and other role permissions. And this is all documented and easy to follow that if you don't have administrator rights to make some of those changes, you're gonna need to speak to your admin. Second, solution seven requires SuiteAnalytics Connect. Okay? So again, if you're unsure about that, speak to your admin or to one of your cloudx...com cloud x, consultants. And lastly, if you wanna use Excel for budgeting automation that you saw, you will of course need next week budgeting and planning. So again, speak to your admin, speak to your one Cloud x consultant if you need to understand that further. So we started on day three of the close. We had that that journal posted and every number went out of date. You exported it again and you rebuilt it again. But here's how that same moment looks now. The journal posts, you click refresh, and the numbers are current. That's what you saw today. A ready made workbook running live on NetSuite data, building blocks you can adapt with Excel skills you already have, a number traced all the way from a summary right down to the source transaction. So you and your team can stop building reports and start reviewing them. So you can go into the close with the numbers you trust instead of the numbers that you're actually spending too much time rechecking. And so the next conversation with your CFO perhaps moves from what happened last month to what do we do next a lot easier. And that's data to decisions. Alright. I will I will pause there for a moment, draw breath, drink some tea, and put it all back to yourselves, in the audience. Questions, queries, thoughts, feelings. Please use the the q and a tab in Goldcast to ants... Ask any questions that you may have. Alright. You did such a good job explaining, Andrew. There's no questions. I've got there in advance. Alright. Thank you, Scott. Well, look, there's there's a couple of things perhaps then. Let me finish off on the, I might try to preempt perhaps. First first thing might be if you're sitting there and maybe too shy and bashful to ask, you know, how does solution seven deal with large volumes of data like, you know, data over years of transactions? The answer to that is that it's designed to report directly from NetSuite so not actually just taking a full copy of all that information. It connects directly into NetSuite to avoid the complexity of setting up and configuring an entire data warehouse. Okay? So in practice, the management packs run on balances which keeps them fast as you saw when it did actually refresh and you only bring in that transaction level detail when you need to drill down. Okay? So the things like heavier analysis such as perhaps reports spanning over several years in detail, you set the date range in the report rather than actually pulling all of that information itself. Okay? Couple of other questions I typically get asked might be can you share reports with someone else who doesn't have solution seven? So absolutely yes is the answer to that as well. So people that don't have solution seven, all you can do is need to do is just lock and drop formulas and just share with them a static report. Easy peasy. I will just look across again and give one last chance to see if there is a question. Yes. Okay. Oh, here we go. So Ruth. Excellent. How does it cope with multi currency and subsidiaries? Well, I'm very, very glad you asked that. It is absolutely built for one world. So it supports full NetSuite one world including multi currency, multi subsidiary, multi book as well. It's just been a more recent announcement that we put out as well. So the consolidation layer itself will use NetSuite's and logic. And so therefore, the way that solution seven works is it relies on the one world consolidation within that single instance there as well. So what you saw today was a consolidated subsidiary and I've got that, hierarchy of different subsidiaries available for me to drill down through as well. Alright. Nicole, can solution seven combine EBIT by multiple divisions? Okay. So EBIT earnings before interest and tax. I I think the the answer to that question, Nicole, is is it always really comes down to what visibility of the data have you got in the first place. Is the EBIT number you're gonna be relying on something that you wanna source from somewhere in NetSuite? If so, absolutely, you can pull that information through into solution seven. If it's a number that's come from perhaps some other calculations or another sheet, again, you can use a pivot table to pull that information through into the analysis sheet that you want to, perform that, report on. So at least, a high level, I would say yes. Absolutely. You should be able to do that. And talk to your one CloudX consultant. Talk to us as Zone if you'd like to to take a look at what that might look like as well. Alright. Any other questions out there? That's a good question, that last one. Yeah. Alright. Well, I, think we're the case, Scott, I will hand it over to yourself to take it home for us. thanks, Andrew. I think we've got this nice little offer for anyone if you want to, a take a shot of the screen there. You can book a, a free assessment, with with us and the one cloud team, to take a look at how you're doing things today and get some recommendations on where we can help you streamline and become more efficient. Rob, is there anything else you'd like to to add to the group? Thank you everyone for making the time to join us today. Hopefully this was insightful. Some great questions. Thank you, Ruth. Thank you, Nicole. Great to see you online. Yeah. Any... Anything you need around solution seven as a product, please reach out to myself or Sandy as you all know, and, I'm sure we'll be able to answer questions and, yeah, go from there. Thank you very much. Great job. Thanks, Rob. Thanks a lot, Andrew, for taking us through it all. Appreciate it. Thanks for the questions, and, hopefully, talk to you all soon. Enjoy your Friday. Have a great day. Enjoy the, weekend. Frank.