ZoneReporting: Instant insights from your NetSuite data

Instant Insights.

Two simple words that highlight both the holy grail of analytics… and why it’s so hard for businesses to achieve it.

Most ERPs do an incredible job of getting data in, but they’re not so great at getting it out. Within the ERP, flexibility is limited, data sources are siloed and difficult to combine and it is hard to share any reports or Saved Searches that you’ve built. Once you extract data from the ERP, you are left with unwieldy columns that require a lot of “Excel gymnastics” to clean, understand, and use – plus, you’re still stuck with the task of combining that data with other sources and building from-scratch dashboards that are distributed manually to every stakeholder. Sound familiar? We know.

This is exactly why 50% of senior accounting and finance professionals said they don’t trust the financial data they’re working with. Worse, 98% of them stated that outdated or untrustworthy data makes it impossible to have confident visibility of their cash flow. Why? Because as good as your finance team is, you’re trusting major business decisions to inefficient manual processes for properly combining all relevant data from Marketing, Sales, and Finance. 

Finally, once they get it all organized – and if they didn’t make any mistakes or run out of time – your CFO is ready to take a look. That’s when it hits you:

These aren’t “instant insights”. They’re outdated outputs from out-of-the-box solutions. And they’re costing you money. 

At Zone & Co, we spent those three years doing something different: we built a flawless BI data model with outside-the-box thinking. 

ZoneReporting completely replicates and reconciles all your NetSuite data in Power BI. Plus, we combine it with additional sources like Salesforce, Google, Shopify, and 350+ others to enable fast, accurate reporting on every aspect of your business. Whether it’s analyzing, modeling, or forecasting, finance leaders and other stakeholders can slice, dice, drill down, and drill through all of the data with a clear visualization of the entire business to bring those hidden insights out into the open. 

Instantly.

Making the impossible possible

If you’re several years into the lifecycle of your ERP, you’ve probably already identified its limitations when it comes to reporting. Out-of-the-box functionality can deliver a lot initially, and the manual workarounds to compile data typically aren’t a heavy lift. However, as your business grows and scales, these manual processes quickly become a weight that drags down decision-making and ties your financial leaders’ hands behind their backs. 

With ZoneReporting, you can eliminate 99% of manual effort in reporting – and share unstoppable insights that power good decisions, project financial implications and align stakeholders on a unified view of what to do.

1. Flexibility

Most ERPs with native reporting struggle to provide the flexibility financial teams demand. Software companies that want to look at MRR roll-forward reports are a great example of this. When it comes to tasks like parsing by upsell, downsell, new business, or churn with specific rules for categorization, an ERP is going to struggle to define that logic. 

That’s why many companies use Power BI. It’s the #1 analytics tool for businesses and it stands alone in the space by delivering incredible flexibility and market-leading AI intelligence. But once again, you have to manually extract the data you need from existing systems, reconcile, import, and define your model before you can leverage it. 

ZoneReporting reconciles and replicates all of NetSuite’s metrics directly within Power BI so finance leaders never have to wait on manual processes for the answers they need today. Everything is automatically organized in real time with unlimited joins so CFOs have an instant ability to leverage all of Power BI’s analytical might. 

2. Visibility

Any analytics tool needs to deliver business views that are clear, complete, concise, and capable of handling any level of granularity. ERPs leave you with no shortage of available data, but where they fall short is a lack of visualization due to custom fields, ODBC limitations, and single joins. 

If a CFO can’t see all the relevant revenue KPIs alongside multilayer reporting by customers, items, and classes and manipulate those views to extract new insights, potential areas of opportunity will go undiscovered. Plus, native ERP analytics can limit the depth of inquiry, losing valuable data lineages along the way. 

ZoneReporting extends NetSuite’s data visualization potential by seamlessly importing it to Power BI, where it can be manipulated and explored by the platform’s 30+ dynamic visualizations. It’s powerful reporting for finance leaders that produces easily identifiable and meaningful data points. They can drill through to line-level detail in Saved Search format that reconciles directly to source systems. 

Whether it’s a financial overview, SaaS, supply chain reporting, or C-suite reporting, ZoneReporting delivers a complete visualization of where your business is today so leadership can decide where you need to go tomorrow. 

3. Connectivity

Data is often siloed and difficult to extract – making it hard to get the full picture for financial decisions. Consider how many places your data lives: likely not just in your ERP, but also in your CRM or E-Commerce system, and perhaps in Google Ads or an inventory system. The effort to combine this data can be highly manual, tedious and time-consuming and can lead to errors that create doubt in your reporting accuracy – unless, that is, the data is automatically connected and combined. 

ZoneReporting can integrate data from a wide variety of external systems and tie it together in a more comprehensive way than your ERP’s native capabilities. That means your financial leaders are equipped with an enterprise-wide reporting solution with built-in sharing capabilities and limitless possibilities for reporting, modeling, and forecasting. 

4. Alignment for the C-suite

Making tough decisions means everyone in the room has to be looking at the same numbers, and that’s difficult to achieve when critical data is spread across multiple systems. If important metrics like Customer Acquisition Cost vs. Customer Lifetime Value don’t represent data from all your relevant departments, executives will struggle to align on priorities and inevitably make suboptimal decisions. 

ZoneReporting brings all your important data sources from Finance, Operations, Sales and Marketing together to give C-suite a complete view of the business they can all agree on. With automated, unified reports that reflect the most of-the-moment data from NetSuite and 350+ 3rd party sources and custom reports, executives can easily share, interrogate and present the numbers they need – all without investing in additional ERP licenses. 

Know your business inside and out with ZoneReporting

At the end of the day, financial leaders have one simple request from the data systems they leverage: the ability to build reports with a BI tool by seamlessly capturing all the data they need out of their ERP. 

That’s it. And it’s not a bridge too far because you don’t have to build it yourself. 

ZoneReporting delivers the maximum return on your investment by reconciling and replicating all the data your business gathers in NetSuite directly into Power BI, so you never have to wait on complex and resource-consuming manual processes and spreadsheets. It gives you enterprise-wide visibility and flexibility in a single platform that extends your native ERP capabilities while you maintain complete ownership of your data. 

Find out more about how ZoneReporting can integrate your business intelligence systems and fuel your competitive outlook with the power of truly instant insights.