How Solution 7 by Zone turns Excel into a strategic advantage

For years, finance leaders have been told that “Excel is dead.” New planning platforms, visualization tools, and reporting systems all promised to replace spreadsheets, automate the month-end close and deliver reporting clarity.

Yet, if you walk into almost any finance team today, from startups to enterprises, you’ll find the same truth:

Excel isn’t going anywhere. It’s getting stronger.

The problem has never been Excel itself. It’s been everything around it.

Disconnected data. Manual CSV exports. Fragile formulas. As organizations scale, finance teams outgrow legacy Excel add-ins and stitched-together workflows that weren’t built for the pace, complexity and real-time reporting requirements of modern NetSuite environments.

What they need isn’t less Excel. They need a better-connected Excel.

And that’s exactly why Solution 7 by Zone is experiencing a resurgence among NetSuite finance teams, because it turns Excel into a real-time, enterprise-grade reporting engine, without asking teams to abandon the tool they know best.

The disconnect: Excel is powerful but NetSuite data is not always easy to work with 

Finance teams love Excel for its flexibility. But when it comes to NetSuite reporting, traditional workflows slow everything down:

• Manual exports create version-control nightmares
• Stale data leads to rework
• Legacy add-ins break under growing transaction volumes
• Multi-entity reporting becomes a never-ending copy/paste exercise

The result? Month-end becomes a scramble, forecasts drift out of sync with reality and teams spend more time gathering data than analyzing it.

The original Solution 7 audience knew this pain intimately, and their needs haven’t changed.

But the modern NetSuite landscape has.

Today, organizations operate across more entities, more geographies, more compliance frameworks, and more data sources than ever before. Traditional Excel add-ins weren’t built for that future.

Solution 7 was.

The turning point: Real-time NetSuite data, right inside Excel

Solution 7 is an Excel add-in, connecting Excel directly to live NetSuite data—no middleware, no data warehouse, no jumping between systems. As soon as a transaction is posted, your report reflects it.

This single shift transforms the way finance teams operate:

• Month-end reports update automatically
• Presentation-ready financials are created in minutes
• Drill-down and drill-back reveal transaction-level detail directly from Excel
• Templates refresh instantly, eliminating manual rebuilds

One finance leader put it best:

“It saves us days of month-end report preparation… the reports are automatically updated and already in a presentation-quality format.” - Andy Manning, Former Director of Financial Systems, Commvault

Excel becomes not just a spreadsheet, but an extension of NetSuite.

Fast setup, familiar tools: The modern finance team’s ideal workflow

New systems often come with long implementations, steep learning curves, and months of change management.

Solution 7 doesn’t.

In fact, most teams can implement it in one hour using their existing Excel and NetSuite skills.

This is critical for today’s finance organizations, which need:

• Tools that adapt to their workflow, not the other way around
• Rapid time to value
• Software that doesn’t disrupt reporting cycles
• Familiarity for distributed or hybrid teams

Instead of forcing teams into new interfaces or rigid dashboards, Solution 7 enhances the tools they’re already using.

A tool that scales with you—from one entity to one hundred

As organizations expand, reporting complexity grows exponentially.

Solution 7 meets that challenge head-on.

With templates that are fully customizable—no rigid layouts, no forced redesigns—finance teams retain complete control over:

• Report structures
• Calculations
• Formats
• Segment-level reporting
  

Whether you're refreshing a single-entity P&L or consolidating across dozens of subsidiaries, Solution 7 handles it with ease.

This flexibility is a major reason why Solution 7 is trusted by over 1,500 customers worldwide. 

The Bottom Line

Excel isn’t outdated.

It isn’t holding finance back.

It isn’t something teams need to “move on” from.

It’s the foundation.

What finance teams need today is not always a replacement for Excel. They need a way to unlock its full potential with real-time NetSuite connectivity, faster reporting cycles, and reliable data.

That’s what Solution 7 delivers.
And that’s why it remains the most trusted Excel-based reporting solution for NetSuite teams around the world.

Explore Solution 7 by Zone