Reports Overview

Welcome back. In this module, I'm going to be covering the subject of reports. Now, one thing that's important to understand about reports is that you need to compare it to saved searches and suite analytics, because those three are all key reporting tools in netsuite. And while I do get in more detail on this in saved searches, specifically, what you should know about it is think about it like a tiered structure.

Reports at the bottom there, the simplest, the most out of the box. Then you move up to saved searches, which are more complex but have a lot more customization, options and features. And then last, you have suite analytics, which is significantly more complicated. But again, it's a very robust tool. It can include graphics and different visuals. So you have those three reports, saved searches and suite analytics are all reporting tools. And specifically, we're going to be going over in this lesson reports.

One important thing to understand is the vast majority of reports out of dozens and dozens of different report types, financial reports get used by far the most. So that's things like a trial balance, a balance sheet income statements. Those are really the bread and butter of reports. It's not that nothing else gets used, but those are definitely the most commonly used. So let's take a look at reports.

All right. Here we are in the home dashboard. So if we go over here in the navigation bar, we have a reports tab. So first off, there's reports overview that just brings you to a basically a dashboard that shows you all these things related to reports. So you can see that if you want to. All right. Then you have a new report and new financial report. So those both create some sort of new report. The new financial will give you a list of options that are specifically financial statements like a cash flow statement.

But one warning before you get into building your own reports, you have to think with the fact that reports the strength that they have is that they are premade. There's a bunch of pre-made, existing reports that you can just grab from. So if you find that those don't fulfill your needs and you really have to pivot over to something that's highly customized, you should ask yourself, are you better taking that time to make a save search as opposed to a highly customized report? It's not that you don't need to or that there's not an instance in which building a custom report can fulfill your needs. But you should just think with what you're going for.

Next, we go down to recent reports. So this is just like any recent records. It's just going to limit it down to only the reports that you've recently access. So you see kind of the most recent ones. Then you go down to save reports. Now, unlike the reports that are premade that come with net week, these reports are custom reports that were made for your netsuite instance. So for example, maybe when you were getting netsuite implemented or you had consultants that made in this case, there's probably 20 or so custom reports that are accessible here. So these were all made for this company.

And then you go down to schedule reports. So basically you have the option. I also mentioned this and save search is where you can send out scheduled, like, for example, a balance sheet, let's say you want to send a balance sheet to all the executives at your company at the beginning of every month. You can set that up as a schedule and anything that is scheduled if you come over here, you're able to see all of those different schedule reports that are already set up in your netsuite.

Now we get down to new search these three. They're all in the realm of saved searches. So they're kind of plopped in the middle here. And we're going to get into that in the Save Searches module. But for now, let's just ignore it and go straight down to the other reports. So here we have as a scheduled searches up here. So here we have financial and it goes down and it goes all the way down to VAT, GST. So notice there's a ton of different categories here. Each one has a bunch of different options of basically pre-made reports that you can access. So these are all in that category of pre-made reports. And really what you do is you got to go, what am I trying to accomplish? What am I looking for?

Maybe you want to check all the sales for your company and you want to see how that breaks down by sales rep. So you take a look at this list and you go, what's probably under sales and then look right there are sales by sales rep. So you can click on that and it populates a report that shows you all the sales broken down by sales rep.

So let's take a look at another couple, see reports that often get used. For example, if we go to financials, so this houses all our financial reports. There's a couple important ones here. So obviously can pull up an income statement, but there's also a comparative income statement. So if I click on that, this shows you not just the income statement for a time period, but also shows you compared to another comparable time period, for example, showing the income statement of this year compared to the same time period last year. So you can have those back to back. You can also do it for things like budgets versus actual expenses. You can have those comparative analysis.

So that's a common one. Another thing you can do is if you go to inventory items, there's a few different things. Here we have current inventory snapshot. So if we click on that, it's going to show us all the inventory that the company has in its various warehouses at this exact moment where everything is distributed. Another common report for inventory is taking a look at the value of the inventory in every warehouse. So again, you just have this long list and you really just need to look at what are you trying to accomplish? Go through the different headers and figure out what is most applicable for your needs. Check that out, see if it immediately fulfills what you're trying to accomplish.

We will have future videos showing you how to do and how to use the report builder. But it's just something to keep in mind. You might want to jump to that next tier with saved searches. And that's it for your reports overview.

In the next video, I'm going to show you how to navigate a basic report. So I'll see you there.

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