Navigating NetSuite integrations with 8Quanta
Ever feel like your finance team spends more time wrestling with data in NetSuite than making strategic decisions? Gerald Hines, CEO and Founder of 8Quanta, a NetSuite Alliance, Payments, and Development Partner, has over 30 years of experience guiding companies through successful ERP implementations – specifically focused on NetSuite. In this interview, Gerald dives into the common challenges finance teams face with NetSuite integrations and how 8Quanta, through its recently announced partnership with Rossum, can help you conquer them.
Welcome Gerald! Today, we’re here to discuss the world of NetSuite integrations, specifically focusing on the challenges faced by finance teams. To kick things off, would you tell us a bit about 8Quanta and your expertise in this area?
At 8Quanta we have many years of experience across all of the core NetSuite functions. A great deal of our clients come to us due to specific difficulties they are having with NetSuite, and they turn to us for solutions.
These solutions can be anything from basic training and awareness of NetSuite capabilities, to reconfiguration of their instance and development of custom code.
We see many instances where the challenges appear as inaccurate or incomplete financial data. This is generally due to missing or inaccurate transactions, sometimes caused by issues with manual data entry and lack of reconciliation activity.
Let’s dig into those complexities. What are some of the key challenges finance teams typically encounter with NetSuite and their integration with other systems?
Many of 8Quanta’s NetSuite customer finance teams have challenges that stem from the data entry activity for financial documents. Examples such as purchase orders with vendor prepayments, purchase orders with vendor bills, standard vendor bills w/o purchase orders, plus many more.
Where a great deal of data is entered manually, it can lead to many different errors. First, the date of the paper document. This date determines the accounting period NetSuite uses to post the transaction. Next, the capture of additional header fields that are required fields that ensure proper reporting in NetSuite. Manual data entry challenges include “fat-fingered” data, incorrect data, and just plain missed data. Finally, the biggest challenge is found at the line level of the documents. The NetSuite Item must be entered correctly, inventory item, assembly item, non-inventory item are just a few examples, then the additional fields must be captured, such as quantity and price.
Integration with other systems pose the same type of problems. Plus one additional challenge is connecting the two disparate systems via an API. Most systems are created in different languages and databases. Therefore, there must be “exact connections” between databases to ensure that NetSuite records are correct. Once that API connection and the mapping from the two databases ensure the field to field connections are correct, then we have the same complex challenges of accuracy of the information being transferred.
In short, our NetSuite customers have the need to both save time and improve accuracy. Without Rossum AI and 8Quanta’s financial expertise these challenges can become too complex. Our NetSuite customers require an answer and our solution provides this answer.
Can you share a specific example of how a poorly planned NetSuite integration created problems for a finance team, and how these issues could have been avoided?
We have a customer that had established a process to take physical documents and hired an offshore 3rd party to manually enter the documents. However, they were completing only 1/3 of the actual steps required for accurate financial recording. This partial approach led to major gaps in their NetSuite financial reports. Without finishing the 2nd and 3rd steps in the process, this customer’s accounts payable balances were more than doubled. Having accounts payable of more that $50 million dollars when the real balance was less than $20 million was needless to say a major crisis.
We have worked extensively with the customer to understand this issue and provide a robust complete solution leveraging the Rossum and 8Quanta fully integrated solution.
Now, we’ve just announced a partnership between Rossum and 8Quanta. Where do you see this partnership fitting in with NetSuite integrations, specifically for finance teams? What is the added value of integrating NetSuite with Rossum?
This partnership will improve our NetSuite customers’ accounting and finance experience. The areas of initial improvement will be in automation of vendor bills. This will save more than 50% of the data entry time. Another area of time saved along with improved accuracy will be the ability to capture copies of signed contract documents.
Currently, we envisage the 3 primary areas of saving will be found in payables, invoices, and contracts. Our view based on experience so far is that the partnership will save a significant amount for customers with large data entry requirements.
Last question. We’re in the second half of the year, and many companies will start thinking about their 2025 strategy. What advice do you have for finance leaders looking to include more automation into the day-to-day tasks of their teams to prepare for the coming year?
Our advice would be for finance leaders to look across their organization and identify where their largest manual data entry activity is found in their NetSuite account. This should then be coupled with information to assess the time that data entry is consuming. This would immediately identify where there is low-hanging fruit ripe for automation.
Of course, we are readily available to assist with this activity and to develop a road map that will lead to significant improvements and cost saving for them.