Name: ZoneUnplugged: Inside the ZoneApprovals Matrix Redesign
Uploaded: 2026-10-07T15:30:50.496Z
Duration: 36 min 40 s
Description: ZoneUnplugged: Inside the ZoneApprovals Matrix Redesign

Transcript for "ZoneUnplugged: Inside the ZoneApprovals Matrix Redesign": Good morning, good evening, or good night, depending on where you're joining us from today. And welcome everyone to Zone Unplugged inside the zone approvals matrix redesign. We have a lot of great content in store for you all today, so we're gonna go ahead and dive on in so we can make sure that we get through all of it. Alright. So first up, a couple quick intros for everybody. So I'll start with myself. I am Haley Ash. I'm the director of customer marketing here at Zone. I am the person behind the scenes at zone helping to bring our customers like you more resources such as zone unplugged, the zone monthly newsletter, and so much more. I will be your host for today along with some friends from the zone team, and I'm gonna pass it over to introduce themselves. So, Andrea, over to you. Hey. Thanks, Hailey. Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Andrea Boyle, senior product marketing manager here at Zone and Co. I oversee our procure to pay and our treasury solutions. Next, I'm gonna go ahead and let Katerina introduce herself. K. Hi, everybody. Thank you very much for joining today's webinar. My name is Katarina, and, I am the product manager for zone approvals here at RedZone. So I'm very excited about today's webinar, and I'm glad that you took the time to, join us today. Awesome. Thank you so much, ladies. Alright. And before we do dive in, we have just a a couple quick housekeeping notes for today's session. The chat has been disabled, just to make sure we can stay super engaged, but you can submit questions as we go anytime using the q and a feature. And we definitely encourage you to. We love interaction. That's why we have carved out a dedicated portion of today's webinar just for q and a. And at that time, we'll do our best to get through as many questions as possible as we can. If you do have an account specific or support related question, feel free to go ahead and send those through too as we go. We'll make sure those get in the right hands following today's call. We will also be running a poll today, so keep an eye out for that to launch as we go. It's gonna be in the right panel for you as well. And then lastly, this session is being recorded, and you will receive the recording via email in the next two to three days. And then don't forget, by joining us here today, we have some free money on the table. And who doesn't like a little bit of free money? So if you can, be sure to stay till the end of the call where we will draw today's episode winner. Alright. So let's chat through our lineup for today. It's an exciting one. Andrea is gonna give you all a quick introduction to the full zone ecosystem of solutions for for anyone joining us today that doesn't know all the things we do here at zone. And then next, we'll get into the good stuff where we'll share everything that's recently changed with the approvals matrix with an exclusive demo from Katarina. Then we wanna hear from you. So we'll jump into the the q and a that I mentioned earlier, and then we'll close out with a few zone updates and finally wrap with our drawing winner for today's episode of Zone Unplugged. Alrighty. Let's go ahead and get started. Over to you, Andrea. Thanks so much, Haley. First of all, for anyone who isn't familiar with zone yet, we built NetSuite native software that helps finance teams run their operations end to end with AI built into the platform, not bolted on. We support more than 4,500 customers globally with a team of 250 plus people across three continents, and we all have about over twelve years of exclusive NetSuite focus. Our platform covers four key areas in finance quote to cash, procure to pay, treasury, and record to report. That includes zone billing for any billing model, in NetSuite with zone receivables coming soon for collections. Then we have zone... Our procure to pay, which includes zone procure, which handles vendor onboarding and procurement, zone capture, which processes vendor bills, zone AP payments that covers that last mile of paying vendors, and zone approvals, which we're here today, runs your bill approval workflows. In treasury, we also have zone reconcile, which handles your cash reconciliation and zone liquidity, brings you your short term forecasting into NetSuite. And solution seven gives you that live Excel reporting straight in NetSuite. Running across all of it are Zoe, our AI agents working inside all of these products. But here today, we are really gonna talk about and focus on the approval matrix. So before we do that, we wanna kick off a quick poll. So let's go ahead and see. Everybody, let's take just a quick second. How many rows are in your largest approval matrixes? You can have fewer than 10, 10 to 50. You know, we're just looking to get an idea here of how many. Wow. We're seeing some... Alright. In the fifties and the hundreds. Okay. So everybody seems to be kind of, like, in that 10 to 50 is the largest. Give everybody just a second more to answer. Alright. Wonderful. Haley, can we pop up the responses so everybody can take a look at the responses? Thank you so much. Oh, so... Alright. So let's go on and move. And so we can see that from the poll that, you know, we're seeing the majority of our... Everybody here today is in that 10 to 50 range. So let's talk about our approval matrix improve... Improvement. Here's the short version that before Katerina jumps into the demo. We rebuilt the approval matrix from the ground up based on what you told us. The approval logic you rely on today doesn't change from this. What changes is the screen you use and manage? It's up to anywhere between 10 to 50 times faster faster for the big matrices loading, and the scroll... You won't have to scroll and wait as well. So if you've hit errors in the past from large locations, departments, or employee list, those are resolved. Make a copy duplicates duplicates a row with every rule and approver, so you build a chain once and just change what's different. Live search filters, the grid by approver role, group or rule. The matrix name and descriptions are now NetSuite field, so you can see them in list views and build safe searches on them. And the best part, this is fully backward compatible. Your existing matrices rules carry over as is. Alright. So let's go ahead and move on to the next one. Alright. So let's talk about really quick before we dive into the demo. When is this happening? So it's coming to your account in mid October. You don't need to rebuild or reconfigure your approvals. Keep routing exactly the way you have them today. It's just a new screen. It's gonna be faster, easier to manage. So it's gonna be included in your current approval matrix. There's nothing to buy, no one to have to talk to. The one thing we suggest is you start getting familiar with this new layout before it lands. That's why we're here today. We want you to, you know, go ahead and you can see Meg's already dropped dropped some help articles for you. So definitely take that from the chat. Go learn about it. But now the key takeaways, Katarina, we want you to go ahead and demo everything and show us how this new matrix c works. Okay. Let's go directly there. So let me share my screen, and we will be good to go. Okay. I hope everyone can see my screen. So, again, thank you all for joining us today in this webinar. It's great to see so many people interested in the approval matrix and where it's going next. As Andre just mentioned, the production upgrades, will be carried out around mid October. In the meantime, you can upgrade your sandbox account so you can navigate the new approval matrix yourself. All you need to do is to upgrade to the latest version one sixteen zero and you will have it, in the usual place because as it was mentioned, this is about, improving the performance of the approval matrix, improving the user experience of setting up the approval matrix. So the rest of the application remains the same. You don't have to learn any new logic. Your transactions will be assigned to approvers just like they are today. So when we are going to check the new approval matrix, we will find it in the same place where it is today. So we will go to setup, zone approval setup, and to approval matrix. This is the first page where you will notice a few changes and, that's the addition of the name and description columns. So now you can name your matrices, you can describe them for easier understanding for anyone else who will be keeping them, up to date. And you don't have to do anything as was already mentioned. So, once you upgrade to, the new version or once we upgrade you to the new version, all your, already existing matrices will be automatically, improved with this new code, with this new interface. So, as you can see for the older matrices, the name will be defaulted to the internal ID and description will be left blank, as it's not mandatory. So that you can see the whole process of creating the new matrix in the new interface from scratch, let me start by creating a new approvals, matrix, so you can see also the initial screen. So you can already notice that we are missing the, top header fields that are currently present in the matrix. They are not gone. We just moved them to the, matrix configuration which can be, called by clicking this button configure matrix. So, you... Those of you who are already familiar with the matrix setup, you will also recognize all of these fields and preferences as they are listed here. The new introduction is the matrix name and the description. So matrix name is, mandatory. It does not have to be the internal ID. You can, use a brief description of what the matrix is going to be doing. So I'm going to name mine USA Matrix for purchase orders. And you can also include a brief description, for example, do not update. And, then, as with the current matrix, you can apply it to either one subsidiary, multiple subsidiaries, or all subsidiaries. For long term maintenance, we recommend, creating one matrix per one subsidiary, but you can have multiple subsidiaries here. The same applies to the record types. For the demo purposes, I will select purchase orders, but you can have multiple, record types selected. Currency is still the same. Approval hierarchy, I will choose the, example one that comes with the application. As for start date, let's make it act, applicable from today. And end date, just as today, it's not required, so you can leave it blank and it will automatically default to expire five years from now. And as for the additional preferences that are available here, it's just like today, overview threshold, and we also have the preference only highest approval required and require one approval per employee. So, once I save my changes, I can come back here to this window and edit, all of these details with one exception and that's the approval hierarchy. This one, even now with the current matrix, cannot be easily changed. It will delete all of your, matrix rows. So, once you save, save the configuration of the matrix, the approval hierarchy cannot be changed. If you want to use a different hierarchy, you need to create a new matrix. So let me save the changes. And, once the matrix screen loads, first, let's say I want to change the name for some reason. So I can just go back to the configuration and change the name here. I will keep it as it is, but it's a possibility. And as you can see, the approval hierarchy is now disabled from being altered and it's also explained here. So, let me go back to the main screen. For our first time users, we now include a quick step by step guide on how to navigate the interface of the matrix and what you can set up here. You can also watch a video tutorial directly from the matrix screen. So, you can get familiar with the new user interface directly in your NetSuite account. And you can also go directly to our knowledge base, to see all the details and read about the new approval matrix or any other details of our zone approvals application. So, that's for the that's for the configuration of the matrix. And now let's get to the matrix grid. There are a few changes from the current layout besides Glueck. So now we introduce, this, row identifier column. As you can see, the first number starts from zero. And as I keep adding new rows, it will keep increasing. What this reflects? For our current users who are already familiar with the approval application, when you have a transaction already undergoing approval, maybe you are already familiar with the order column here. Right now, what we are showing is a number, but it's not really reflected anywhere in the matrix. So, what this number actually stands for is the row ID. So until now, you were able to identify the matrix that is associated with the transaction. With the new approval matrix, you can also identify directly the exact row that was assigned to the transaction. So if the number there says one, then this row number one was assigned, to your transaction and you can easily confirm that that's the expected outcome. Let me now remove these unnecessary rows for now and, let me go to the next column. That's rules. I will talk about it in more detail in a few seconds. And then the rest of the grid, contains the approval levels. This is the same as in the current approval matrix. So there's no change. However, what we changed is that we removed the edit mode, or view mode, and the necessary switch in between the two. So I can directly start selecting approvers without having to click that pencil icon and confirm that this is how I want the row to be. I can just directly start selecting and it is reflected in the approval row. So that's for the selection of the approvers. There's no change here from the current process. So you have available the four types of approvers, sourced approver, static group approver role, or a employee approver. So let me just select a few here. And, we... Well, let me select a source approver as well and a group approver, for example. And now to the rules. As, our current users, will be used to the chips, this is probably the biggest change that we did here. So, we did not change the logic of how approvals, or approval routing works, but we renamed the chips to rules and we placed them in this cool drawer, on the side. So that from now on, the rules, or chips, as formerly known, don't take up the entire screen so you don't even see your approvers and you are forced to scroll left and right. Instead, we are making it condensed in this simple column. So you still have an overview of your criteria that you select for each approver row, but you also see who the actual approvers are. So, we kept here as default, the, most popular rules or criteria, formerly chips, that our customers use the most, like class, department, location, and their align, counterparties. But you can always select, your additional custom or other standard fields that you want to use as criteria for your approval routing. So for example, if I want to add a custom segment, I would just click additional fields, add segment. And, again, this works the same as in the current matrix. I select, for example, our city segment and I edit to my matrix. As you can see, the newly added field is added directly at the top of the drawer, so I don't have to scroll all the way down if I have multiple rules here selected, and I can directly start, setting up the values. So for example, for my first row, I want to use prac, as my, value for the approval routing. I will select hardware for the class and department will be service. As, you are already familiar with the is not operator that's also preserved here, So I can also use that, with my department, for example. And, if I accidentally click the cross icon instead of save, we prompt you to, decide if you indeed want to leave without saving the changes or not. So I want to save my changes. And, let's just say that for a different, department value, I actually want to have a different, first level approver. So what I would have to do nowadays in the current approval, matrix, I would have to add a new row and start populating it from scratch. With the make a copy feature, we removed that manual effort and you can just click here and the entire row gets immediately copied. So I can just easily edit the rules and change it to, for example, marketing. And click save, and I will just change the approver selected here, and I'm basically done with my editations. So, that's how easy it is with the make a copy feature. I can, definitely make multiple copies. As you can see, the row identifier keeps increasing the number as, it identifies, the, the, each row, respectively. And, I can just as easily remove these rows if I don't actually need them. So, let me also change an approver here, for another one of my colleague. And I also want to show you what the rules, Colium does when I, for example, have a lot of values selected for each of my rules. So let me select multiple classes. I will also add a location, again, with multiple values and I click save. So to, prevent the rules from taking too much of the screen space, we introduced truncation for for the values. If you have more than three, rules selected, we, introduce the rest, by hovering over the more link. And you can see here the additional, rules that are applied to this row. And the same applies to, rule that is showing but has way too many values, selected so you can see them by hovering over the more link as well. However, this does not mean that they are hidden and you always just need to, you can only see them if you, expand the drawer here. You can also directly search for them using the filter here, filter search. So, for example, here, the hidden class is, Rex. So let me just type it here and the row immediately pops up. I can also search for an approver. So, for example, I want to see all the rows where Andy is the approver selected. So as you can see, it immediately filters out only those rows. Let's just say I want to see, zone approvals controller. And, again, it directly shows me just the one related row. If I want to filter out rows based on multiple criteria, let's say I want to see all the rows where Andy is the approver, but at the same time, the city or the class is actually hardware. Okay. It will show me all of them, I believe. Yes. As both have class hardware. But let's say department must be, or cannot be, or is... Sorry. Marketing. Yes. So now it filters out only the one respective row. If I want to clear the filters, just like in a spreadsheet, I just, cross the, values out and I'm back to all of my approval rows. So, if I am, if I am ready to, save this matrix as I set it up the way I need it at the moment, I can save it as a draft and, it will become ready for activation once it is saved. As you can see, it is still undergoing a safe process. However, it is already much faster than, it is with the current user interface. So the matrix is now saved in a draft mode, as you can see here. And, if I am actually ready to activate it, I can just click activate. Or at this point, I can also introduce any changes that I would need to make to my approvers. So I can also select here, for example, additional approver and now I can activate the matrix. And, the activation now is also, very fast. So as you can see, the chip is now showing active. And if I go back to the list of the matrices, I can see that, here is my matrix with the name and the description. So, this is the new approval matrix. You are free to, check it out already now in your sandbox accounts if you upgrade your zone approvals to the, latest version, one sixteen, point zero. And, you can, explore, before we start with the production upgrades. Okay. This is all for the demo, and I hand the word over back to, Andrea or Haley. Yes. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for the the great demo, Katerina. That was wonderful. We are gonna go ahead and head into our q and a now. A lot of questions have been coming in. I know Meg has been doing a fabulous job giving some written responses back. We did get a couple presubmitted questions as well. So, Katerina, we'll go ahead and start with those. Let some other folks have some time to get other questions in, that they might have for you. So feel free to go ahead and just keep keep keep them coming, guys. But we'll start with those those, presubmitted. So our first question is, do we need to rebuild or reconfigure our existing matrices when the update arrives? Katerina, are you good with taking this one, or you want me to take it? If you can take it for now, that would be great. Thank you. Wonderful. So, no, if you already have zone approvals and you're using it today, you do not have to rebuild everything. We've made this backwards compatible, so it'll work with your existing matrices. The idea is that this is gonna just help improve your load time in the... This view of the actual matrices screen. Awesome. Thank you so much, Andrea. And then another question that was pre submitted was, does make a copy bring the approvers over to or just the rules? Okay. Not sure. I'll. take that one. I'll take that one one both. If, it clones the whole row with every rule, threshold, threshold, and approver tier, you just change the one thing that's different, like the department. Perfect. Awesome. Thank you so much, Andrea. And I see a lot of questions coming in, so thank you, everyone. We're gonna go ahead and start... I might go ahead and just start with some of the ones that, Meg has actually been answering, but, we'll just tee them up so everybody can see them live. So let's see. Let me find a a good one. You guys are asking a lot of a lot of great questions over here. So let's start with this one from Annette. So I'm gonna cast to the screen. Annette asked, is the option still available to edit an existing matrix as I do not need to add a new one anytime soon, we just modify approver? So I know Meg answered this one in the, in the response, but it's an yes. I don't know, Katarina, if you wanna expand on this any further. Yeah. Sure. So, the logic of saving the matrices, is the same as today. So basically, you can still, edit an existing matrix and, once you save it, it will create a new one. So there's no change in the process, here and you don't always have to be creating a new matrix from scratch. That's for sure. Perfect. Awesome. Thank you so much. And then another one that we did get that Meg did also share an answer for is can you change the name of the older matrix from the internal ID? Yes. Yes. That's also possible. However, this change will introduce the matrix to... Again, will require it to be saved, as a as a new matrix. Okay. Perfect. Alright. And then we received this one from Rose. Rose asked, can a custom line level field in a transaction record be set as a sourced predefined approver? No. We support the header fields, and, it must be a employee in the... On the transaction. So a custom field, yes, but it must be a body field. Okay. Perfect. Awesome. And then one that we received from Colin, Colin. Sorry. Not sure how to pronounce that. But Colin asked, are there any AI features in the new zone approvals update? If so, is there a way that we can turn those AI features off? So I don't know. Andrea, do you wanna do you wanna take this one? Absolutely. Thank you so much. So we do have with... If you have zone capture and zone approvals, you can get access to zone control center, which gives you access to Zoe. Zoe gives you the option you would have to accept the terms, and then you can ask it just natural language questions, about your approvals, and it'll provide those responses back to you. If you'd like some information, we'll drop the help article, or we can send that to you later about how to install and get started with Zoe and zone control center. Beautiful. Thank you, Andrea. Alright. Our next question is from Amy. Amy asked, Yeah. is CSV upload going to be a future feature for creating a matrix? So I just answered. But, basically, redesigning the approval matrix was one of the prerequisites that we wanted to do, as that simplified also our back end architecture so that our next initiative can be, the introduction of the CSV import and export of the matrix because, we know how hard it is to transport matrices, not only between accounts, but also, if you just want to set up a more complex, approval matrix. So we definitely want to make this part of the setup easier for you as well. So, that's the next, piece of work we will be working on in our zone approvals team. Perfect. Alrighty. I'm gonna go ahead and cast another one up that we did also answer. The team's so fast with these written responses, you guys. But Natalia asked if we create a new line, we can change the sequence. Like, this new line could be before or after specific line. Yes. That's, also a possibility, and you can freely drag and drop the lines, as you wish. And, also the index of the of the approval matrix line will be adjusted to match the Okay. Awesome. Alrighty. I'm trying to find another good one new order. us to ask you while we have you, Katarina. Let's see. I think we've we've gone through a lot of them. Alright. Let's go ahead and ask this one from Annika. So Annika asked if you use the vendor approval matrix and have lots of vendors exceptions, then all these vendors need to be uploaded for each department row. Will I be able to copy these as well? I'm honestly not sure if I understand completely, but, basically, anything that you select in the approval matrix row, if you then copy the row, everything will be carried over. So everything that is selected in the rules and, in the approval fields will be copied to another Perfect. Alrighty. row. Okay. Let's see. We'll maybe take one more question, and then we'll move on to our our other updates that we have for everybody. So let's see. I'm gonna go ahead and tee this one up from Rose. I think I did not ask this one yet. So Rose asked, can a custom line level field and a transaction record be set as a source predefined approval? Did I ask you this one already, Katarina? I'm sorry. I think I might have. Yeah. Yeah. We. covered this one. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. There's so many questions, you guys. Okay. So let's see. What have we not asked yet? Alright. I don't think we asked this one to you yet. So I'm gonna go ahead and share this one. Can the column be dragged and dropped into a different order? No. As for the columns, I assume, you're aiming at the approval levels. So, those are still defined by the hierarchy. So, it's not possible to do it directly in the matrix. You would have to still go into the approval hierarchy setup and, adjust it there. However, we recommend to always create a new approval hierarchy, rather than editing an existing one that has already been used with a matrix. Alrighty. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Katarina. And thank you everybody that that wrote in a fantastic question. We are gonna go ahead and move on to the next portion of today's session. But, if you think of anything else, while we continue to go, please, please feel free to to submit those to us, to us still. So I'm gonna go ahead and start sharing my screen again, and we're gonna go ahead and move on to some updates that we wanted to share with you all at zone. So, just a few things that we wanna take a couple of minutes to make sure you were aware of. So first is some zone resources. So wanted to make sure that everyone was aware before we do wrap up that, there's a lot that's available to to support your journey here at zone. So whether you're looking to expand your product knowledge, troubleshoot an issue, or just stay up to date on what's new, and we have a lot that's coming. We've got you covered, in one way or another. So first up is gonna be Zone University. This is your hub for on demand product training education with content designed for both new users and experienced teams looking to level up. And we actually have a brand new zone university, interface. So you should have gotten some communications about that now being available to you. We highly encourage you to check that out. Next step is zone support. If you ever need assistance, our support team is always here to help through our support portal as well as our Zoe agent for technical support that is available twenty four seven for instant answers. You can also explore the zone knowledge base. This is gonna be available for searchable articles, how to guides, and best practices tailored to real customer use cases. You can also access access that via some of the links that Meg has been sharing in the chat. And the next step is gonna be the zone newsletter. So be sure to subscribe. This is our monthly customer customer newsletter featuring product updates, customer stories, upcoming events, and so much more. I've dropped the subscription link in the chat so you can sign up or manage your preferences there. And just rounding this out, we we just really wanna encourage you to take advantage of all these resources. Truly, they're designed to help you get the most out of your experience with Zoom. Alright. And then before we do wrap up, we'd love to to see you at one of our upcoming events. So we'll be at Suite World in Las Vegas later this month, followed by NetSuite Insight Days in London in November. So if you're interested, and in the area for either, scan the QR code here and you can learn more and register. We would love to see you in person. Alright. And then before we do get to our drawing, I also wanted to make this group aware of our our latest program here at Zone and highlight it for a second. So this is the build with Zone program. It is our customer feedback and co creation program. You'll see if you you scan the QR code, we have a variety of options for you to get involved with across a variety of our solutions. And this includes things like pilots, early access to feedback forums, advisory councils, and a whole lot more. So just scan the QR code to see everything currently open and choose what might interest you. So we would love to love to have you be a part of that with us, here at Zoom. Alright. So if you hung with us this long, it is now officially time to draw our winner for today's session. I'm gonna go over to my handy wheel of names. Alright. And we're gonna go ahead and spin this and see who our winner is. Alrighty. That was a close one. Okay. So, Simon, Simon, if you are on with us, I will be in contact, with you shortly to make sure we get your gift card over to you. Alright, everybody. That is a wrap on today's session. A big thank you to everybody that joined us here today. We... We're so glad you came along for the ride, and we hope you walk away... Walked away having learned something new about zone in the approvals matrix. Keep an eye on your inbox. Like I said, you'll receive a follow-up email in the next few days with the recording in case you'd like to revisit anything we covered here today. And then I did just wanna share that we do have some other episodes coming up, so we would love to have you have you joining us at that. I just dropped a link in the chat. We will be covering, our other solution, solution seven, coming up October 15. So if you're interested in learning more about that, we'd love to have you on that episode too. But without further ado, that concludes today's session. Thank you again for joining us. Have a great rest of your day, everyone, and we will talk soon. Bye bye.