Training Overview
Home Dashboard
Setting User Preferences

Home Dashboard

Lesson #

7

Setting User Preferences

In this video, we take a look at the user preferences available in NetSuite and give recommendations on some of the best features to set.

Next Lesson:
Employee Center Overview

Learn the Basics of NetSuite with our Free Introductory Course

Register Now

Video Transcript

Welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to set preferences. And one thing to keep in mind is that when you're setting your preferences in Netsuite, you're not influencing anyone else's Netsuite. In fact, if you've got multiple roles such as a sales manager role and a sales representative role, depending on which role you're accessing and setting your preferences, it will only apply to that role with a few exceptions like the time zone that you're in.

So if you do set anything, make sure that you're also setting those for any additional roles that you have. So let's take a look at this. So here we are in a home dashboard. Notice that we are in the sales manager role. And if we go to our little home symbol, we have this preferences button.

Okay, So we have this subtab list. We've got eight here and we've got a number of different options down below. So there's a lot of things you can change. In most cases, users are only going to change or want to change a few things. There's a lot of settings that you really don't need to mess with. And I'm only going to cover some of the key ones that I recommend you change depending on your situation. If you want to look through and just kind of sift through, look at the field, help for any of the additional settings you can, some of them might fit your personal preferences. But some things really don't need to be changed.

There are certain settings such as you'll see this alerts tab you can set. For example, if you do a saved search, you can set an alert to that as opposed to setting blanketly for your role to have alerts go out at certain times. So again, certain settings you probably don't need to mess with, but let's cover some of the key ones here.

So first off, we have if we scroll down, we have things like localization that's like what language you're using, what's your time zone? We also have formatting on like how do you like dates to look or numbers. So you might as well go in there and just make sure you set what your preferences.

Okay, So the first thing we're going to cover is the show Internal IDs. So basically what this does not have it checked, but for most accounts it's going to default as unchecked. And what it does is let's say you hover over a field and you click on it. It's going to give you this field help. It's going to explain what is this field doing? And notice, it has a field ID here. So it says what the field ID and really what that is, is for like SuiteScripts, meaning you've got consultants or developers that are doing things with Net Suite. They need that field ID to be able to operate with these things. So it's important to be able to have it here if you don't have that box checked. There will be no field ID here.

And while for most users you may not need to know what an internal ID is for any kind of field, it's often good to have it just in case. Maybe you're doing some troubleshooting with a consultant and they're going to walk you through and they need to look at certain fields that you're operating with. It might be important for them to be able to see the internal IDs. So if you share your screen, you want them to be able to see that. So it's just a good idea to have that checked and just have it as a basic rule of thumb.

Next, we're going to go down to this optimizing Netsuite so there's a few different checks here and settings you can put that are helpful. But in this, I'm really just going to cover the top two, which are this number of rows in list segments and maximum entries in dropdowns. So a list segment that would be like, let's say, do a saved search and you come up with all these entries. How many entries do you want to see be able to see in one page before you have to click next page to go and see the next batch? So maybe in this case it's defaulted to 25.

Now, might be obnoxious if I've got 500 items in that save search. I don't want to have to click next page 60 times. So it can be good to make that number a little larger and dropdowns. Like if I click over here, I've got probably a couple dozen different languages here, but in some cases the dropdowns will have 100, 200 items. And again, 25 can be pretty limiting and can be a bit annoying to deal with. So you can make the numbers much larger as large as you want. I think there's a cap of 1000 and then 500. The only caveat is that whatever you set, if it's a very large number, it will make the load time for your pages that much longer to pull up all those entries at once. If you make those numbers really big and you're loading a lot of data, it could take a little longer. So something to think with.

Now we're going to go on to appearance. All right. So we've got color up here. Now, I mentioned this in a previous video, but I want to make another point about it, which is that if you're dealing especially with sandbox accounts, is often a very good idea to set your sandbox accounts as a completely different color, such as if I've got blue here, I might set a sandbox to hot pink. So as soon as you go into that account, it's immediately apparent that you're in a sandbox account. And I would set all my sandboxes as that same color. So again, it just immediately indicates to me that I am in a sandbox account and that can be very important again, especially for consultants or administrators.

The worst thing is to think you're messing around in a sandbox account and then accidentally send out a bunch of emails to real clients or think that you've done a bunch of data migration in your actual NetSuite account to only find out or realize that you've actually been in a sandbox account the whole time. So it can be a great idea to just set it as a different color and it immediately kind of gives you a red flag that you're in a sandbox account.

The next thing I'm going to cover, if you go down, we've got this use classic interface button. And what that does is originally NetSuite had a certain kind of look and also a configuration for the navigation bar in terms of what tabs go where and what items are within those tabs on the navigation bar. Then more recently, changes were made so that when you go into specific roles, the settings in what items are in the navigation bar are in different places and they did it to optimize. So, you know, if you're in a sales manager role, they put it so that it's really convenient for you all, all the kind of things you might deal with are there.

So that can be helpful for some people. It's great for the one downside of that is if you're especially if you're trying to debug things or maybe you know, you're dealing with your administrator or your consultant to try to figure out, you know, why can't I do this? Or maybe you're setting something up if you've got it. Not in classic. All of your tabs are going to be in odd places, so it's going to be harder for the consultant to go, Oh, you know, just go up here, go to customers, go down to transactions and over to this. The tabs are going to be in all different places. And it's almost impossible for a consultant to remember every single role configuration. So you if you set it to classic, it allows you to have just a basic setup that's most familiar with everyone. And if you don't want to have it on the classic setting, you can leave it off. However, when you do have some kind of troubleshooting session, I do recommend you click use Classic interface On. That way your account is most familiar and it'll be easier to navigate for others. So that's something to think with and can be an easy fix.

All right, so that's for classic interface. Now let's go on to analytics. So there's on the left side here, we've got report by period. Now it's common when you're dealing with certain reports, especially financial statements, you often want to look at them by period, right? You might want to look at it by a tax calendar year. You might want to look at it by a month or by week or by quarter. So it's important to be able to at least have the option to look at it by period. In this case, the default asset is never, which is limiting in that regard. So it's generally best to just select all reports and then I'll give you that option to be able to search those things.

You can also look through these other options. You know, you can set make your company logo be on it, especially if you're printing certain financial documents or if you want your reports to have grid lines, you can set that. But this one is really the key one that you're going to see most often.

And that's my best recommendation for setting your personal preferences. I'll see you in the next video.