NetSuite’s “Export to Excel” function enables me to drop my AP Aging Report into a spreadsheet where I can prepare a Custom Cash Requirements Report quickly. We then have current data upon which to base daily decisions on how to best utilize our cash resources. We can move funds from Line of Credit to Checking Account to Money Market Funds, pay vendors, fund payroll, and make short-term and long- term decisions for how to best spend our money.
Read more »

In addition to email notifications, BTM has created many Custom Formulas on Saved Searches. Twice monthly HR utilizes Custom Formulas with Saved Searches to calculate Sales Commissions for each pay period, eliminating much time and effort and ensuring more accuracy. We do know that Netsuite has an automated tool for sales commission tracking, however, it did not work the way we needed it. The great thing about the software is you have the ability to choose.....is the Netsuite report out of the box what I need .... or .... Read more »

When coming in to take over the invoicing duties at Blue Tent marketing we didn’t have a clear understanding of what payment methods our clients used. We offer clients three choices on how they can pay their Blue Tent invoices: pay by check, by credit card, or via ACH. We had no idea of how many open invoices were assigned to each payment method and didn’t really have clear visibility into when and how much would be processed and deposited into our checking account. Simply put, trying to manage cash flow was a challenge. What did we do about it? First we clearly labeled each customer Read more »

I can't believe it's already close to the middle of July.  As this summer continues to move into full swing business at blue tent continues to do well.  Just last week our director of sales and I headed to the outer banks of North Carolina.  This story should resonate well with other NetSuite users.  The nightmares of not having access to your data and company information is now days of old. Read more »

This summer will prove to be either a big move for small/ midsized business or it may go down as the Titanic. It's up to each of us as leaders to make sure that nightmare does not happen to our business. One of the things we are doing at Blue Tent is an in-depth customer segmentation process. In the first 4 months of the year we saw many small to mid sized businesses really starting to spend more and focus more on growth. As of the last 45 days, we have seen things cool down a bit. Read more »

As I posted last week our end of year accounting has been significantly helped by our full transition to Netsuite. Our in house bookkeeping team has been able to work with our CPA to close our 2009 faster than I can ever remember. The ability to access netsuite over the Internet from any location has helped us steer away from the on site meetings, long drawn out conversations and has allowed us to do our CPA and bookkeeping work. A few things that I have noticed this year as opposed Read more »

I am sure that everyone is battling a bit with cash flow in these tight economic times. Our company has been looking at ways to move our customers to a more automated payment process. The questions began when we started spending so much time trying to collect for $26/month hosting contracts…. A real pain and also quite unprofitable. So how can we use our Netsuite accounting software and CRM functions to mine our customer data and make sure we have a crystal clear understanding of how each of our 400ish customers is set up to pay? Read more »

I thought this week I would outline some of the ways that Blue Tent is starting to optimize our use of the Netsuite tool to have greater visibility into our customers and prospects. When we originally adopted Netsuite, it was as a CRM or customer relationship management tool. Over the last three years we have seen our focus shift to the operation aspects of the tool. The focus on accounting software and operational project use has pretty much consumed our optimization focus and time. As many of us in the nation know we need to continually refine and define what our customers and prospects are doing and how the enter our sales and marketing cycles. This last month our in-house optimization wizard Jay has begun to refine our customer picture. This has accomplished a few strategic goals. Read more »

With all the buzz around going green, I came across this article in InfoWorld ( http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/businesses-should-demand-tax-break-cloud-computing-407 ) and thought, hey, why not? The author is arguing that if the government is going to give tax breaks for things like tinted office windows, using geothermal heat pumps or driving hybrids, why not cloud computing too? Based on the findings that cloud computing saves the same per year as the annual electricity consumption of 56,000 homes and reduces greenhouse gas Read more »

This week I thought it would be a good idea to write about the accounting software aspects of the Netsuite platform. The idea that a small to midsized can have access to the types of financial reports that are usually the domain of large cap fortune 500 companies at a fraction of the cost of SAP is just crazy! A few reports that we are working on:
-    Exact amount of our recurring revenue
-    This month vs. last rolling quarter of web hosting revenue
-    This month vs. last rolling quarter of hosting expense Read more »