NetSuite Tips – Setting Up Reminders

Continuing our series of guides for our NetSuite customers – this month we’re looking at setting up reminders. Our guides are designed to provide hints and tips to make our customers’ lives easier with regard to the use of NetSuite – here we focus on making sure you never miss the information that is important to you, and you never forget the activities you have planned.

You can set up two types of reminders in NetSuite – we like to call these “transaction reminders” and “activity reminders”.

Transaction reminders are for important data in NetSuite and include a list of pre-defined standard reminders (such as “customers to bill” and “tasks due today”) as well as custom reminders, based on your saved searches. These reminders appear on your dashboard.

Activity reminders are related to the scheduling side of things. You can set up reminders to remind you of events, tasks and phone calls you have scheduled. These can be set to email you or pop-up within your browser. 

Setting up “transaction reminders”

If you have certain data within NetSuite that is important to you, then these reminders are useful because they allow you to see this important information at a glance as soon as you log in.

They appear in the Reminders portlet on your dashboard. Clicking a reminder in the portlet takes you to a page with more detail, where you can take action as necessary (provided you have permission to view the information).

Note: These reminders are dependent on you utilising the relevant functionality related to that reminder. For example, if you haven’t set up any tasks, then your “tasks to complete” will not show up in your portlet. If you haven’t set completion dates on your projects that have passed, then “Overdue projects” won’t show up.

Firstly, to add a Reminders portlet to a dashboard, click the “Personalize Dashboard” link in the top right. In the Add Content panel that appears to the left, click or drag and drop the Reminders item onto your dashboard. Now you can set up your reminders (if you don’t have permission to “Personalize Dashboard” then you may need to speak with your Administrator.) 

To set up reminders: 

1. In the Reminders portlet, hover over the down arrow and then click Set Up
2. To view a list of the predefined reminders, click Add Standard Reminders 

• Click a reminder in the left list to move it to the right list 

• Click Done after you have finished selecting standard reminders for display in your portlet 

3. To select custom reminders for display in the portlet, click Add Custom Reminders

• Click a reminder in the left list to move it to the right list 
• Click Done after you have finished selecting custom reminders for display 
• Notice that each custom reminder is indicated with a “c” icon 

4. You can change the order in which reminders appear in the Reminders portlet by using the Move To Top and Move To Bottom buttons, or by dragging and dropping individual reminders
5. Click Save
   Your reminders will now appear in your portlet, provided there is something to remind you about that day.

Note: To see continually updated results for reminders, click Refresh periodically. 

Creating custom reminders from saved searches

If the reminders provided by NetSuite don’t meet all of your needs, you can create your own reminders and add them to your Reminders portlet. Each custom reminder is based on a count of the results of a saved search.

To create a custom reminder, you must enable the “Available for Reminders” option on the saved search definition page. After this option is enabled, the saved search is listed as a reminder on the Set Up Reminders page, and you can choose to show it in the Reminders portlet.

1. Create a new saved search or edit an existing saved search
2. On the saved search definition page, tick the Available for Reminders box
3. Make sure that the search name is suitable for display in the Reminders portlet. The search name is displayed in the Reminders portlet, with the format: <number_of_results> <saved_search_name>
4. On the Results subtab, check whether the saved search includes any summary types that group search results. Some points to note: 

• Custom reminders work best for saved searches that do not have any grouped results because reminders are based on a count of the number of results 
• If you set up a reminder for a saved search that groups results by a summary type other than a count, the reminder will not display 
• It may be best to remove summary types or to recreate the search without summary types for use as a reminder 

5. Once you have created your custom reminders, you can set them up to appear in your Reminder portlet by following the instructions above

If a custom reminder causes an error that prevents the Reminders portlet from displaying properly, edit the saved search for the reminder and clear the Available for Reminders box. After you save this change, the problematic reminder should be removed, and the portlet should be able to display. (You may need to refresh.) 

Setting up “activity reminders”

You can choose to receive your activity reminders in an email, or in a pop-up window in your browser when you are logged in to NetSuite.

Note: To ensure that you receive your reminders at the correct time, make sure the clock on your computer is set to your time zone, and then go to Home > Set Preferences to set the same time zone in NetSuite. 

To set up reminders when creating an activity 

1. Go to Activities > Scheduling > then hover over either Tasks, Phone Calls or Calendar/Event
   
2. Click “New”
3. Fill in the details of your chosen activity, ensuring you tick “Reserve Time”
4. In the Reminder field, select the amount of time in advance of the event that you would like to be reminded
5. In the Reminder Type field, select how you would like to be reminded 

• Browser reminders pop up in a window at the designated time if you are logged into your NetSuite account 
• Email reminders are sent to the email address you use to log in to NetSuite 

6. Click SaveIf you select to receive a browser reminder, make sure you have enabled pop-ups, or it will not appear. 

If you would like to find out more about how NetSuite works, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team of experts or view our other guides below.

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