What is NetSuite SuiteCloud Platform?

If your company relies on NetSuite, you’re already familiar with the range of useful SuiteApps and customizations out there. While exploring ways SuiteApps can help tailor NetSuite’s capabilities for your finance team, there’s a good chance you came across the NetSuite SuiteCloud Platform. 

NetSuite SuiteCloud Platform is an extensibility/customization environment that helps businesses adjust NetSuite to meet their unique needs. It’s designed to be usable for non-technical administrators and IT staff alike, allowing them to make field and data model changes, implement automation, add platform extensions and integrate their tech stack. 

What benefits does the NetSuite SuiteCloud Platform deliver?

When application developers, business analysts and IT developers put the NetSuite SuiteCloud Platform to use, they can get more out of NetSuite than ever before. This platform lets people and organizations build on NetSuite’s core capabilities while minimizing the time and effort associated with this work.

SuiteCloud comes with a number of significant advantages, such as:

• Business process automation. SuiteCloud gives users the ability to automate everyday processes/tasks with visually defined, coding-free workflows.
• No version lock. Customizations made with SuiteCloud carry forward during each version upgrade – no modifications required.
• Software lifecycle management. With SuiteCloud, developers can automate and control every step in their end-to-end application pipeline.
• Standards-based integration. SuiteCloud helps users exchange data at scale with cloud-native and on-premises applications over widely-used interfaces such as .NET, ODBC, CSV and REST.
• Control over roles and permissions. The Access Management tools found in SuiteCloud let administrators choose roles, permissions and more. That way, they can ensure their accounts are 100% secure and audit-ready.

But what is it, who can use it, and what separates applications built entirely on SuiteCloud from integrations or bolt-ons?

Understanding NetSuite SuiteCloud Platform features

SuiteCloud gives users unprecedented control over how they construct their financial data systems. Some core features of the NetSuite SuiteCloud Platform include:

Platform development

Between the SuiteCloud Development Framework (SDF) and the JavaScript-based SuiteScript customization language and APIs, the NetSuite SuiteCloud Platform makes extending NetSuite easy. While using SuiteCloud, developers can access a wide range of tools, processes and environments for developing and managing NetSuite integrations, customizations and applications.

Customization

The NetSuite SuiteCloud Platform also simplifies the process of customizing and enhancing NetSuite’s out-of-the-box capabilities. SuiteCloud’s enhancements follow a visual, no-code approach, letting non-technical workers make meaningful changes without getting IT involved.

Process automation

With the help of NetSuite SuiteFlow, companies can automate workflow-driven tasks, improving their efficiency as a direct result. SuiteCloud’s process automation functionality can automate everything from alerts and data input validations to complicated multi-step processes. SuiteCloud users can also build and optimize automation workflows from an easy-to-understand point-and-click interface.

Performance monitoring

If a company’s NetSuite system isn’t functioning as intended, SuiteCloud’s Application Performance Management (APM) steps in. SuiteCloud APM keeps a close eye on a business’s NetSuite accounts and gives administrators and IT teams access to a visual dashboard. Thanks to that data, IT can easily diagnose and optimize their test and production accounts.

Internationalization

Since NetSuite is used around the world, solutions based on it should be ready for global use. With that in mind, the NetSuite SuiteCloud Platform helps organizations in 110+ countries deliver experiences tailored to worldwide users and administrators. Thanks to this feature, developers won’t have to worry about their product’s language, data format or currency in any country they work with.

Integration

With the help of industry standards for creating scalable integrations, NetSuite SuiteCloud Platform Integration gives teams the power to extend NetSuite into any business process they need. In many cases, native SuiteApps are available that allow users to fully leverage the data capabilities and automation that NetSuite can provide. This feature also lets companies exchange data on their NetSuite account with other applications and environments.

How can businesses distribute SuiteApps with SuiteCloud?

Thanks to features like these, people can easily use the NetSuite SuiteCloud Platform to build powerful SuiteApps. But once these applications are ready, companies need a way to get them into the hands of users – and SuiteCloud can help with that, too.

One of the core components of the SDF is NetSuite SuiteCloud Platform Application Distribution. While using this feature, developers can package, deploy, update and promote their NetSuite applications with little to no friction. Meanwhile, the SuiteApp Marketplace and SuiteApp.com make it easy for businesses to find truly reliable applications.

When developers use SuiteCloud’s distribution capabilities, they can get:

• A presence on the SuiteApp Marketplace. NetSuite lists a wide variety of first-party and third-party SuiteApps on its own marketplace.
• Integrated distribution. SuiteCloud’s cloud distribution services are fully integrated with this platform’s other technologies. That way, developers know their applications will be safely distributed to the SuiteApp marketplace and customers’ accounts.
• Project validation. SDF helps developers validate every aspect of their project before it gets deployed and distributed, giving them a chance to catch errors before their software goes live.
• Access to the Software Control Center. While using SuiteCloud, developers can utilize the Control Center. This is a centralized environment for managing application/packaged customization distribution.

Native SuiteApps: What you need to know

While the SuiteApp marketplace is the go-to place for businesses looking for SuiteApps, not all of these applications will deliver the results you’d expect. Some of these solutions are more closely integrated with SuiteCloud than others, and native SuiteApps are the best of the best in this regard.

The term “native SuiteApp” describes SuiteApps that reside entirely on the NetSuite SuiteCloud Platform. Since these applications are truly part of NetSuite, companies can take full advantage of SuiteCloud’s features and benefits while developing them. Meanwhile, users will have no trouble getting used to these applications – native SuiteApps feel like they’ve been built into NetSuite from the start.

Get the most out of SuiteCloud with Zone solutions

If you need SuiteApps for NetSuite finance automation, Zone & Co’s NetSuite-native solutions give you unprecedented control over your data. These native SuiteApps are hosted on SuiteCloud and run inside NetSuite. Because of that, the people on your finance team can add these tools to their existing workflow with little to no difficulty.

The powerful SuiteApps that Zone provides include:

ZoneBilling

ZoneBilling gives finance teams the power to fully automate usage calculations while speeding up revenue recognition by 70% and making the overall billing process 80% faster.

ZoneApprovals

With ZoneApprovals, you can cut approval errors by 99%, benefit from bulk approval processing and enjoy 100% audit visibility.

ZoneCapture

Thanks to ZoneCapture, finance professionals can save over 25 hours a week, lower invoice times by 83% and reduce data entry inaccuracies by more than 90%.

ZoneReconcile

Using ZoneReconcile can reduce your reconciliation errors by 99%, speed up your reconciliation process by 95% and give you full financial data integration support.

ZonePayroll

ZonePayroll gives businesses access to more than 90 built-in reports and a 50% boost in payroll processing speed.

Zone Data Warehouse

This cloud-based data storage solution helps companies securely store huge datasets – and with Zone Data Warehouse’s 99.9% uptime, you’ll always have access to the data you need.

Would you like to learn more about Zone’s NetSuite SuiteCloud Platform-powered SuiteApps? Take the first step by planning a demo of these solutions!

“I reviewed all the major players in the space, and Zone’s AP automation solutions were by far the most performant. They integrate seamlessly within NetSuite and work so well, you would think they were part of core NetSuite.” – Ryan Maher, Director of Finance and Administration at Amigo Mobility