What is NetSuite?
NetSuite is a cloud-based suite of enterprise-grade business management tools all managed under one excellent system. Its core functionality is built around enterprise resource planning (ERP), but it also offers CRM, HR, eCommerce, and more.
NetSuite’s single database openly communicates with all modules at the same time providing full visibility and insights for all parties. With HR, payroll, and financial data in a single place, your company gains visibility into how workforce performance impacts financial performance.
A Different Way of Thinking about How to Run Your Business
What caught my attention was the integration of HR functionality right inside of the financial system. That got me thinking, what are the advantages to having your HR and payroll system integrated with your financial system as opposed to the tradition of using a dedicated HR and payroll solution and a dedicated financial solution.
NetSuite’s human resource management offering, NetSuite SuitePeople, provides a plethora of capabilities that make HR service delivery easier and more efficient for everyone across the organization. With a single tool to manage HR, payroll and financials, organizations can eliminate third-party integrations, improve data accuracy, create a more engaging workforce experience and make better-informed decisions to tightly align workforce performance with business performance.
What areas of HR does NetSuite SuitePeople address?
- Employee records: SuitePeople allows users to create and manage employee records, including personal and professional information, job titles, and salary details.
- Time and attendance tracking: Users can track employee time and attendance, including clocking in and out, scheduling shifts, and managing time off requests.
- Payroll: SuitePeople includes tools for calculating and issuing employee pay, including integration with payroll tax and benefits systems.
- Performance management: Users can create and manage employee performance evaluations, including setting goals, tracking progress, and providing feedback.
- Onboarding: SuitePeople includes tools for onboarding new employees, including the ability to create onboarding checklists and integrated purchasing requests for equipment and supplies.
- Policy and compliance: The system includes tools for managing employee policies and compliance with laws and regulations, such as equal employment opportunity and workplace safety.
Why it’s better when Financial and HR Systems work together
Typically, businesses run a financial system, and HR system, procurement system and so on. These systems usually don’t connect to each other or if they do, the data movement is clumsy and not in real time.
Let’s look at the challenges that commonly happen when finance and HR systems don’t work together:
Limited Insights & Operational Inefficiencies: There is little to no visibility into how workforce performance impacts financial performance. Ultimately, a lack of communication between finance and HR about changing business conditions can affect staffing, budgets, and performance goals.
Poor Workforce Planning & Scheduling: Without a streamlined process to align talent with business goals within budget, businesses are unable to effectively plan. This can lead to understaffing or overstaffing which results in rising labor costs, and lower productivity levels.
Inaccurate Payroll Reporting to Finance: Employee data and financial transactions are managed separately, leading to discrepancies in payroll reporting to the General Ledger and requires a significant amount of manual reconciliation efforts.
HR & Finance Data Reliability: Manual and disconnected systems lead to inconsistencies, errors, and delays in reconciling employee information and financial data that can impact data accuracy, privacy, and security.
NetSuite Financials and SuitePeople Value Proposition
Below is how NetSuite SuitePeople creates a better experience
Increase Business Agility: This system breaks down organizational barriers to improve communications and enable leaders to make faster, better decisions based on changing business conditions with insights from the suite (monitoring employee performance, analyzing revenue per employee, and changes to staffing budgets).
Reduce Labor Costs: You can optimize workforce planning and reduce workforce costs by enabling managers to make better day-to-day business decisions by connecting your people data to your business data (e.g. employee shifts are aligned to sales demand or manufacturing demand).
Gain Better Control of Workforce Costs: You can access and analyze payroll expenses across the organization with real-time postings to the general ledger so leaders can make more informed decisions and help ensure departments stay within budget.
Enhance Data Integrity: Because this is a unified solution, there is a single source of truth with no need to export or import sensitive HR and financial data. Data security is protected by role-based permissions. Having a single solution provides the same cost centers and system languages to reduce confusion.
Is this only for companies that don’t already have an HR solution?
The short answer is no. By transitioning from manual, disjointed systems that disperse and store employee, time, payroll, and performance data across multiple platforms, you can enhance operational efficiency, improve reporting and gain valuable business insights while reducing growing software costs. Even if your current supplier can provide you with some sort of analytic capabilities, they are only based on HR data and cannot consider the overall financial data.
But my Solution Provider is talking to me about AI
NetSuite is staying on top of technological trends with the introduction of generative AI across the entire suite. For HR, NetSuite Text Enhance can help employees, managers, and HR leaders increase the speed and accuracy of important HR activities. Examples of assisted authoring use cases include writing job descriptions and requisitions; drafting goals, including detailed descriptions and measures for success; creating content for peer-to-peer kudos; and providing a summary of the employee’s performance based on feedback gathered across the year from the employee, peers, or managers, and goal progress and achievements.
Customers
See how actual NetSuite customers including DataBank Holdings, Abernathy, and Urban Legacy found success with SuitePeople.
How to Get Started Netsuite suggests doing this in 3 stages:
First Stage
- Enhance operational efficiency by transitioning from manual, disjointed systems that disperse and store employee, time, payroll, and performance data across multiple platforms, which leads to inaccurate reporting, little to no insights, and growing software costs.
Second Stage
- Optimize labor costs with improved reporting by ensuring payroll data is seamlessly sent to the general ledger so financial leaders can analyze.
- Connect all HR business processes including HR administration, workforce management, and performance management to further drive business performance.
Third Stage
- With improvements to reporting accuracy and unification of data from across different LOBs, begin to make more informed decisions about your workforce.
- With the Suite receive actionable and deeper real-time insights from across the organization—sales demand from CRM and budget from finance—to forecast and optimize worker’s schedules to meet business demand.
My Take
Trying to streamline real-time communication from HR to Finance or the other way around can have its issues as seen above. If you are looking to add agility and cost saving to your organization, this type of approach certainly has it merits.
