Understanding SuiteAnalytics Workbooks

NetSuite now offers “SuiteAnalytics Workbooks” designed with powerful business intelligence to give you the data you need, when you need it

Reporting is one of the most crucial parts of any business that helps organisations to make better decisions. Getting fast, accurate information and discovering patterns in data requires strong reporting capabilities from your Accounting/ERP system.

NetSuite’s newest offering “SuiteAnalytics Workbooks” can help you analyse NetSuite data for valuable business intelligence in the form of interactive visualisations. It is an analytical tool that allows complex workbooks to be created combining tables, pivot tables, charts, and datasets/queries. Just like the other native reporting tools within NetSuite (reports/saved searches/dashboards), SuiteAnalytics Workbooks is also natively available as part of the core functionality (there are no additional software costs for this feature!)

Key benefits of SuiteAnalytics Workbooks:

1. User friendly interface – it has drag and drop functionality that can be used easily by your end-users with limited knowledge or record schemas and query language
2. Highly customisable – it supports multi-level joins of records and custom formula fields whilst also offering multiple display options for hierarchical fields and conditional highlighting options
3. Multiple data visitations (Tables/Pivot tables/Charts) – it has built-in tables, pivot tables and charts, which helps you to present data in a more comprehensible format
4. New analytics data source for consistent data – it is designed to display consistent record and field metadata across the application
5. Workbook/Dataset sharing – you can share workbooks and datasets with individual users or groups of users on a role by role basis

How to visualise data using SuiteAnalytics Workbooks?

STEP 1: Create Datasets

A dataset is SuiteAnalytics Workbooks’ single source of truth (source data). It is the database query component of SuiteAnalytics Workbook which is built from fields within a user-defined base record and its joined records.

The dataset builder provides a tree-like structure that shows the relationships between records. Building a data set is a simple drag and drop process for defining the report fields needed for results / criteria / filters.

STEP 2: Create Workbook

A workbook is the Data visualization component of the SuiteAnalytics Workbooks. It enables you to make sense of your data by analysing your data in different perspectives like summarisation / aggregation / graphical representation.
There are 3 visualisation types within the Workbook:

1. Tables
2. Pivot Tables
3. Charts

• Workbook Table Views

Workbook table views are where you can explore your dataset query results without altering the source data of any workbook visualisations that are based on the selected dataset. Data is displayed in a flat file format (consisting of rows and columns of data).

• Workbook Pivot Tables

Pivot Tables allow you to create multiple views of your dataset query results to analyse different subsets of data. Within each table you can define multiple fields for each pivot table dimension, add measures and create calculated measures, or create filters unique to the table to customise your results.

• Workbook Charts

It is a graphical representation of your source data. There are multiple chart types (Basic/Stacked: Column Chart, Bar Chart, Area Chart, Line Chart) you can create, all of which you can add to any NetSuite dashboard using the Analytics portlet.

Learn more about how to use NetSuite’s SuiteAnalytics Workbook tool to gain real-time insights into your business’ data