Well, first post here. Nice idea to provide a forum for Netsuite customers to share their experiences. Not sure if this will become a regular thing for me or whether I'll post only when I have a major point to make but hopefully I'll be able to find some interesting and thought provoking topics.

 2008 was a pretty torrid year for my business and I know that I am not alone in feeling glad that it is behind us. Like many businesses in the UK right now, one of the biggest threats we face is from the paralysed banking system. Bankers, scared for their own jobs, are too frightened to make a decision, favouring masterful inaction. Who can blame them in the current climate but I wonder if they realise the consequences.

 However, if they are reluctantly forced to make a non-trivial decision, and I believe this attitude is common amongst all of the UK high street banks, they will only do so when that decision is franked by the opinion of a professional adviser. Previously they'd have trusted us to do the work, assess the risk and do the right thing - They'd have made their own mind up as to whether we were right or not.

 As a result, over the course of the last few months we have been deluged with requests for information about the business. How many of this? What is the value of that? When were these sales made? This would have been difficult enough in normal times but when everyone is under pressure and downsizing is in the air, it becomes impossible. Or does it?

 Netsuite comes with a vast number of pre-defined "Saved Searches". A saved search is just that - it is a way of defining search criteria to find certain pieces of data which fit certain criteria and saving the definition for future use. But it goes so much further and the real power is in writing your own searches. You can display the data in many different ways, coloured or highlighted to show if it is in or out of range, in a grid or report format. You can have calculated fields, totals and subtotals and with pretty much the full set of Oracle commands to use (Netsuite runs on an Oracle platform having been started by ex-oracle guys) there is almost no limit to the degree of complexity and flexibility and it can all be exported into excel with a push of a button. It can even be emailed hourly, daily, weekly, monthly direct to those who need to know and react.

 What does this mean in practice? Well when some know-nothing consultant comes up to borrow my watch to tell me the time, and he asks a question he thinks will be a real tester to show off the breadth of his qualifications, I can give him an answer to three decimal places in no time flat. Does he go away impressed - Hell yes.

 And that, finally, is my point in this inaugural post - Business is a confidence game. You need to be on top of your data and have answers at your fingertips to demonstrate that your business can be trusted to pick a path through treacherous waters. Bankers and their advisers love it, even if they don't much like the answers at the moment. All my KPI needles may be red and pointing down right now but the fact that I can tell them when every sale was made, who made it, how much they sold, how much they sold last month and last quarter and last year means that when they do feel like making a decision, it is much more likely to be in our favour than if they weren't confident in us. And that is worth its weight in gold right now.