NetSuite 2021.1 has arrived!

NetSuite rolls out product upgrades twice per year to provide requested features, upgrades, or bug fixes for all NetSuite accounts. These new enhancements offer ways to streamline business processes or implement brand new functionality for businesses looking to improve their operations. As your NetSuite partners, we have gone ahead and put a list of highlights to ensure you're prepared for the release. The release will be conducted on a rolling basis from February 2021 to April 2021. To find out when your upgrade will occur, login to your NetSuite dashboard and check out the new release portlet to learn more about your upgrade date. Also, see the overview of enhancements and feature changes in NetSuite 2021.1.


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Critical Features

  • The introduction of centralised subsidiary purchasing and billing consolidates purchases across multi-subsidiary businesses and generates vendor payments from a single location. This can reduce purchase order volume and automate corresponding cross-charges. 

  • New expense commitments and budget validation functionality prevent overspending by validating purchase requests and orders against a business's available budget, ensuring that budgets are closely followed.

  • SuiteApprovals now provides email approval, making it possible to review, approve, or reject transactions on the go by simply clicking on email links. Staff can use the accompanying email approval log to review and audit email approval actions before they are updated in the system. 

  • With the latest global bank feeds feature, companies can now use the Bank Feeds SuiteApp to automate the importing of financial data from banks in Asia, Australia and New Zealand, increasing efficiency and simplifying tedious reconciliation tasks.

Optimising the Project Lifecycle

  • NetSuite 2021 Release 1 brings the debut of SuiteProjects; a professional services automation solution built natively on NetSuite. SuiteProjects combines project management capabilities, resource management, project budgeting and project accounting, providing complete visibility and control over projects and billable resources. When combined with NetSuite CRM, financials and SuitePeople, SuiteProjects becomes the finishing touch on a comprehensive single platform for running a services business.

  • Expense report policies can be expanded to set limits for each expense line in a project, and additional filters allow for control of policies based on billable line items. The combination of controls and notifications ensures alignment with company policies and client contracts.

  • By clicking the new "retract" button, employees can easily correct weekly timesheets before they're approved, saving time for employees, approvers and administrators alike.

 Automated Inventory Management

  • The NetSuite Pack Station is a new touchscreen packing solution that can consolidate shipments, pack multiple cartons simultaneously, manage multi-level packing and scan weights from scales. This provides an extra layer of verification before orders are shipped.

  • Warehouse management system (WMS) enhancements in NetSuite 2021 Release 1 include wave automation (for taking advantage of off-peak wave processing), tally scans (which improve picking by making bar code scans quicker and more reliable), cart put-away, bulk picking, added support of mobile status changes and automatic label printing.

  • Channel allocation and reservation functionality enables order allocation by channel and lets you enter inventory reservation in advance of the sales order. This leads to better tracking of sales and operations activities. 

  • Finally, with the new supply allocation against blanket PO feature, location assignments are now based on the earliest availability and required-by date. This means orders can be promised more accurately by using the best location recommendation to match those timeframes.

 Platform and Analytics

  • New application performance management (APM) dashboards monitor and analyse the health of REST web services-based integrations. Support for REST web services has also been enhanced.

  • SuiteScript APIs have been made more powerful and easier to use for application development and account customisation projects, and the new secrets management feature set enables developers to manage authentication information securely.

Hear NetSuite experts talking about the  enhancements and feature changes in NetSuite 2020 below:

 

Industry-Specific Enhancements

 

Wholesale distributors & Manufacturing

  • NetSuite has introduced centralisation of invoices and billing across multiple subsidiaries for which items are ordered under a single Purchase Order. This includes processing returns and paying vendors all from one location. 

  • The NetSuite Pack Station provides a simple touchscreen interface to boost packing accuracy and speed. Packers can scan and pick from sales orders and ultimately reduce the time to ship orders out of a warehouse. 

  • Improvements to the Autonomous Supply Planning module include enhancements to the Planning Workbench, Supply Chain Snapshot and automation improvements to the Supply Planning Process.

Learn more about the Wholesale Distribution and Manufacturing enhancement and feature changes in NetSuite 2021.1

 

Retailers 

  • Commerce enhancements – Allow customers to easily re-order previously ordered items using the MyAccount enhancements.

  • Allocate orders by channel and reserve inventory in advance to prevent overselling or underselling by channel. Instead of creating new locations, everything can be viewed together to assist in controlling inventory across different markets. 

Learn more about the Retail enhancement and feature changes in NetSuite 2021.1.

 

Services 

  • Introduction of SuiteProjects, a professional services automation solution. Manage projects, resources, budgets, accounting and combine with CRM, Financials and the other modules within NetSuite to create a comprehensive single platform for running a services business. 
  • With Project Purchase Automation and visibility, project managers can initiate purchases from projects and route through purchase approval processes. Enhance the collaboration between project management and the purchasing team. 

Learn more about the Services enhancement and feature changes in NetSuite 2021.1.

 

Not for Profit 

  • New Soft Credit Capabilities recognise constituents who help bring in donations. This assists in measuring the total, giving the impact of a constituent. 

  • New fundraising reports will be introduced to help identify donors metrics, such as recency, frequency and time-lapsed. 

 Learn more about the Not for Profit enhancement and feature changes in NetSuite 2021.1 

Find out more 

To find out more about the new release, log into NetSuite and open the Release Portlet. If your release preview portlet is not available on your dashboard; Click 'Personalise' and locate the 'New Release' icon and add it to your dashboard. 

 

How should you be preparing? 

We recommend using the release preview environment to test all customisations, integrations, workflows and general business processes that may impact your day to day operations. To access Release Preview accounts, an administrator can go to Setup > Company > Release Preview and click Request Release Preview. NetSuite will create an account for you so that you can become familiar with the new capabilities of NetSuite and test your processes before your Production upgrade to 2021.1. The Account Administrator will receive an email notification as soon as your account is available and ready to use. 

If you have any issues with this, please contact our support team. 

Refer to the Release Process for a detailed and comprehensive guide on how to setup the test environment and perform testing. 

The 2021.1 Release notes provide a comprehensive list of all the upcoming changes. If you're interested in any of these features you may review the Feature Previews page to learn more.

 

Annexa is here to help! 

We understand you may have questions about this upgrade, and we are here to help. Our professional services team are on hand to help with anything you need regarding this upgrade, including conducting training sessions if required.  

For assistance regarding the considerations, testing, new feature demos or any queries, please contact support@annexa.com.au or call us on 1300 994 550.

 

Annexa is a leading NetSuite partner with extensive experience designing and implementing comprehensive and customised business systems, including payroll solutions, financial management, warehouse management and ecommerce solutions.