Overview of Process Flows

Welcome back. In this video, we're going to be doing an overview on process flows.

Now, what is a process flow? A process flow. It's a series of actions that altogether create an activity that is fundamentally important to a business. For example, if you're selling goods or services to a customer, that activity in its entirety can be considered a process flow. So the reason this is important to take a look at is when you're just dealing with Netsuite and you're looking at records or doing some kind of function, you lose sight of the fact that the various records that you're interacting with are all part of these process flows.

And if you can understand that and really take a high level overview, look at what this is, then you start to understand what are you really doing in Netsuite? What are the steps that come after you and the steps that come before you? And that can really help you to operate smoothly and competently within Netsuite.

So we're going to be taking a look at a chart to just understand some of the key process flows that any business would have. So let's take a look at this.

Okay. So to illustrate this, we're just going to pretend that our company is Dunder Mifflin, which is just a fictional paper company. It sells reams of paper to other businesses. So if our organization is Dunder Mifflin, the first process flow would be the aspect of dealing with vendors so that we can receive the raw materials or the inventory or supplies that we need to operate our company. And we would be paying the vendors so that process flow would be referred to as procure to pay. We are procuring inventory or supplies or raw materials and we are paying the vendors.

The next key process flow would be giving goods or services to a customer and then the customer giving us cash or payment. So that process flow is referred to as order to cash.

And lastly, we have the process flow of basically handling our bookkeeping, making sure our accounting is in order, and then also delivering financial statements as needed to maybe our executive body stakeholders and the tax department for whatever nation the business is in. So that process flow outwards from the organization to stakeholders, executives or tax departments is referred to as record to report. You're recording these various accounting transactions and you are reporting these financial statements.

These are by no means the entirety of all the process flows that exist. There are several other key ones, but these are three of the most fundamental ones. And these are three that we're going to be looking at in more detail in some of the future videos to really give an overarching view of these process flows.

And that's it for your overview on process flows. I'll see you in the next video.

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