Saved Searches Overview

Welcome back to Netsuite Supertraining. This module is going to be a series of videos specifically covering saved searches. Saved Searches is a term you've probably heard in the past. It's basically a robust tool in Netsuite that allows you to do a search or a query into the database and pull out various information that you are looking for.

Now, the saved aspect of a saved search is the fact that there's an ability to have a permanent recording of that saved search. So you can access it at any point in the future. And you can also make that saved search accessible to other Netsuite users within your Netsuite instance.

So let's take a look at saved searches in Netsuite. All right. So here we are in our home dashboard for the administrator role. Now, if we go up here in the navigation bar under reports and then we go down, we see saved searches.

Now, before I get into this further, I want to point out that there's three key reporting tools in Netsuite. And I'd like to kind of clarify what's the difference between them, because you have saved searches, but you also have reports and you have suite analytics. So what is the difference between these three tools?

The key difference is the fact that you can think of it like a tier system where on one end you have reports which are the most kind of out of the box or pre-made. And then way on the other end of the spectrum, you have suite analytics. So reports are very kind of out of the box. They're prebuilt. They don't have a huge amount of customization, but they can be very, very helpful. And they also tend to be formatted in a way that's very easy for presentation.

So they're made. You can look at financial statements, you can look at some of these basic kind of queries using the reports tool, and we'll cover that in a separate module, one up from reports. You now have saved searches, which have a lot more customization, a lot more flexibility in terms of what you're searching, how you want the data to be presented. It might not always be as kind of nicely formatted as reports, but it's still you can customize how you want that to be presented.

And then up from saved searches, you have suite analytics, which has an enormous amount of flexibility and customization features. It also has a lot of ability to attach data to charts, graphs, grids, these kind of visual elements. Downside of suite analytics is it is a quite a complex tool to use. So if you don't already know how to use it and have been trained in using it, it's not something you can just pick up and kind of utilize. So reports are the simplest to work with. Suite analytics, definitely the most complicated and saved searches is in that middle ground.

Save searches are used a lot. They can be very, very helpful, but there is quite a bit to them, especially to get into some of the more complex features. So we're going have a series of videos where we're covering exactly how to customize these things. But I just want to get you familiar in this video.

So if we look at the screen here, we've got the saved searches down here and you'll see you have a lot of preset. This is just for this specific Netsuite account. You have all these preset saved searches. We can click on all saved searches and it will actually give us a list. And you'll see on the right here we have total 493. So we have a huge amount of already made saved searches. Many of these came with the account. Some of them were just kind of custom made.

So as you get your Netsuite implemented, there will be custom saved searches that fit your exact requirements. But as you can see, an enormous amount of saved searches are already pre-built. And just to give you a concept of a type of thing you might want to search for, a saved search would be.

So first off, one thing to think with is the vast majority of saved searches that get used are transactional. So something related to a transaction, whether that's a sales order, a purchase order, some sort of transaction that it tends to be the bread and butter of saved searches.

Now, for example, if you were sitting there going, all right, I know we've got a bunch of sales orders, but I want to take a look at all the sales orders that are above $500 in value. What type of customer is making those higher end purchases? You can build that into the saved search, specify all the parameters, and then start specifying the information you want to get out of it. Like the type of customer, where that type of customer lives, what type of products they tend to buy that then go over $500. You can build that all into a saved search, so it's giving you the exact information you need so you can make better management decisions and basically look at that information and have it be a tool for you.

So that's just an example of a saved search. And in the next video, I'm going to go into detail in making a saved search and kind of some of the key elements of a saved search. So that's it for the overview on saved searches. And I'll see you in the next video.

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