Posted by Terry Melnik, Product Marketing Director

For the modern services company, the competitive landscape is getting more and more difficult. Differentiating yourself, and finding competitive advantages are critical to your growth. Driven by customers like you, the newest NetSuite release, 17.2 includes many enhancements to help you be more competitive, take advantage of market changes more quickly, improve compliance with the newest revenue standards, and track your performance the way you need to measure it.

For the CFO or finance team, profitability is one of the most important key performance indicators of a service company’s performance. You can have dozens or hundreds of customer engagements, but regardless of the complexity or duration of any of these engagements, profitability is a key measure of success. While the method used to calculate profitability may seem to be a standard formula, feedback from our broad customer base proves that the layout and data in a profitability report are varied. In 17.2, NetSuite introduce more flexibility in the Advanced Project Profitability report through the introduction of a dramatically easier-to-use interface which allows you to define the setup of the methods and elements used to calculate profitability. Easier controls on the project profitability will make it simple to define your own layout to see as much detail and context as required. Money leakage, through errors in time reporting or rates, or other issues with project accounting are reduced as well as improving your ability to track underperforming projects more effectively.

With the 17.2 release, we also help your finance team with the introduction of our Advanced Change Order Management to help address the evolving revenue recognition standards and ASC 606 compliance. For those not aware, ASC 606 provides a comprehensive, industry-neutral revenue recognition model intended to increase financial statement comparability across companies and industries and significantly reduce the complexity inherent in today’s revenue recognition guidance. While ASC 606 should ultimately simplify how revenue recognition is managed, Advanced Change Order Management will help facilitate the accounting changes required to get into compliance by enabling the automation of re-allocation and re-classification in ASC 606 where contract modification is not accounted for as a separate contract, according to the contract modification date. Advanced Change Order Management benefits your finance team with improved governance, compliance and controls.

As a business leader of a services company, the ability to understand your market, make critical decisions and execute is critical to your growth. When making the important decision to increase billing rates, either for a given engagement or to take advantage of growth opportunities or changes in market demand, timing is everything. With the introduction of NetSuite’s new Billing Rate Cards, we address that challenge by adding more control throughout current and future billing rate changes. With the new Effective Dating and Future Rate Changes, resource managers and financial teams can lock in future billing rates with an effective date at any time. Missed rate changes, or errors in agreed upon rates are practically eliminated, maximizing revenue from every resource. All invoices are updated automatically once the effective date is reached, avoiding inaccuracies and the required corrections, improving customer service and satisfaction.

17.2 is an exciting release for all our services industry customers and continues to demonstrate NetSuite’s leadership in the services space with industry-leading features that help drive better visibility, compliance and controls. Learn more about the latest NetSuite release, 17.2.