What’s New in the NetSuite 2021.1 Release? Discover New Innovations Across NetSuite

As NetSuite customers look ahead to 2021, they are preparing for new growth opportunities, and a critical part of that is optimizing financial and operational business processes. NetSuite 2021 Release 1 seeks to further help the cause by injecting intelligence and automation into everything from financial and project management to multi-subsidiary operations and inventory management.

What’s new

• Companies can consolidate purchases across multi-subsidiary organizations and generate vendor payments from a single location with the new centralized purchasing and billing feature. The payoff: better spend management and increased productivity.
• New expense commitments and budget validation functionality prevents overspending by validating purchase requests and orders against an organization’s available budget, ensuring that budgets are closely followed.
• With the latest global bank feeds feature, businesses can now use the Bank Feeds SuiteApp to automate the importing of financial data from banks in Asia, Australia and New Zealand, increasing efficiency and simplifying tedious reconciliation tasks.

Feature highlights for Wholesale Distributors

• The NetSuite Pack Station is a new touchscreen packing solution that can be used to consolidate shipments, pack multiple cartons simultaneously, manage multi-level packing and scan weights from scales. This provides an extra layer of verification before orders are shipped, potentially preventing customer dissatisfaction and avoiding the cost of having to reship an incorrectly packed order.
• Added warehouse management system (WMS) functionality provides the ability to automatically create picking waves and organize by delivery times, delivery address, shipment numbers and more. Wave creation activities can be scheduled for off-peak hours so that the system isn’t taxed during busy periods. Other enhancements focus on tally scans, cart put-away, bulk picking and automatic label printing and support of additional mobile status changes.

Feature highlights for Manufacturers

Feature highlights for Software companies

• The new delta charges feature in SuiteBilling global invoicing lets software companies create delta charges for changes to invoiced service periods. This ensures that invoices precisely reflect changes to original invoice amounts, rendering credit memos unnecessary, reducing changes and simplifying customer invoices.
• Staff can review, approve or reject transactions on the go with SuiteApprovals email approval. These actions can be taken with a simple click in an email, leading to more flexible and quicker transaction approvals, and the accompanying email approval log allows for review and auditing of those actions before any system updates.

Feature highlights for Retailers

• Allocate orders by channel, as well as reserve inventory in advance of a sales order to prevent overselling or underselling by channels. Instead of creating new locations, everything can be viewed together, which helps to deliver inventory management KPIs around fill rate, first expiry, first out (FEFO) rules and more.
• The release also includes the ability to allocate against a blanket PO, with best location recommendations to enable more accurate order promising for orders that will require multiple payments over a period of time. This includes by the earliest availability and when the supply is required by.

Feature highlights for Services companies

• NetSuite 2021 Release 1 brings the debut of SuiteProjects, a professional services automation solution built natively on NetSuite. SuiteProjects combines capabilities in project management, resource management, project budgeting and project accounting, providing complete visibility into, and control over projects and billable resources. When combined with NetSuite CRM, financials and SuitePeople, SuiteProjects becomes the finishing touch on a comprehensive single platform for running a services business.
• With project purchase automation and visibility, project managers can initiate purchases from projects, access project views of purchase transactions and route purchase approvals. This fuels collaboration between purchasing and project management, and project managers can use the simplified user experience to easily view the impact of purchases on projects.

Feature highlights for Nonprofit organizations

• New soft credit capabilities recognize constituents who help bring in donations. It allows multiple constituents to be attached as soft credit recipients on a transaction. This helps a nonprofit precisely measure the total giving impact of a constituent.
• New fundraising reports in NetSuite 2021 Release 1 help identify donors who have given in the past but haven’t donated this year yet. It makes it easy to generate a list of lapsed donors. It also shows the recency and frequency of previous gifts from these lapsed donors.

Feature highlights for Developers and Admins

• Administrators and operations teams can now deploy new Application Performance Management (APM) dashboards that monitor and analyze the health of REST web services-based integrations running in their NetSuite accounts.
• In this release, NetSuite introduced native language support for SuiteAnalytics Workbooks, letting users analyze and explore business data and associated workbook fields in their language of choice.

This post was originally posted on the NetSuite Blog. By Lisa Schwarz, Senior Director, Product Marketing