NetSuite Documentation and Cleanup

Accurate Information to Manage and Cleanup Your Account

NetSuite accounts can have tens of thousands of customizations; these customizations can be interconnected in as many as a hundred thousand different ways. 

Documenting and tracking this is so time-consuming that nobody does it properly. We’ve seen everything from Excel spreadsheets to handwritten notes, but every manual approach has the same problem — it's time-consuming to collect and impossible to keep up to date.

So we automated it. 

How Strongpoint Helps

Strongpoint scans your account on a continuous basis to produce an accurate, up-to-date record of all customizations, critical settings, roles and permissions, and all associated metadata. 

Then, we give you a suite of powerful tools for working with it. With Strongpoint, you can instantly see the connections between customizations, so you can know what's connected to what, what's safe to delete, and what's causing those errors your users are complaining about.

The Strongpoint Spider

Strongpoint's intelligent Spider creates an evolving record of more than 120 types of metadata in your NetSuite account. The initial scan takes about three days, and won't impact the performance of your system or the productivity of your team. After that, Strongpoint will automatically keep your documentation up to date, so it is always reliable.

Accounting Settings  and Lists Custom Records and Custom Record Fields Other Custom Fields (Body, Item, Entity, Column, etc.)
Mass Updates Saved Searches Unlocked and Unencrypted Script Records
Locked Script Records (without dependencies) Critical Settings and Preferences Forms

Script Deployments, Libraries

 SCA folder files and all custom SS, SSP and JS files User Roles, Permissions, and Assignments
Workflows Dependencies And more

 

Great Documentation — for Free

Accurate documentation is so important to managing NetSuite — and to Strongpoint's enterprise-level compliance and change management tools — that we're giving it away for free. 

Flashlight, our entry-level product, gives you on-demand account documentation, as well as several tools that help with discovery and troubleshooting common NetSuite problems. Fill out the form to get a free license provisioned to your account. 

Strongpoint Flashlight

Discovery and Account Management

With accurate documentation of the customizations in your NetSuite account, everything from basic discovery to access review and regulatory compliance becomes a lot easier. We cover some of these more advanced applications in other Use Cases — but if you're just looking for a tool for day-to-day investigation and troubleshooting, we can help with that, too. Here's a rundown of some of the out-of-the-box management tools that come with all versions of Strongpoint. 

See how customizations are connected

Make simple, safe changes with confidence

Quickly resolve issues when they arise

The Strongpoint dashboard is your at-a-glance overview of the state of your NetSuite account. Instantly see what's new, what's changed, and what requires your attention:

 

Strongpoint creates detailed records for every customization in your account. The Customization Record contains an overview of everything you need to know about a customization — who created it, what it connects to, when it was last changed and, more.

Here's a short demo using our free Flashlight product:

 

The ERD is a graphic representation of the dependencies on a customization. It's one of our most popular features — Admins and developers, in particular, regularly rave about how much time it saves them. 

Here's what it looks like:

 

 

Key Feature: "What Changed" Reports

One of our most popular features, the "What Changed" report shows you exactly what the name implies — every customization that's been altered or deleted in a given time frame.
It's an easy way to get a top-down overview of development activity, and troubleshoot any problems that arise. 

Account Cleanup 

Unused customizations are a natural byproduct of NetSuite's exceptional flexibility — and a common occurrence in any mature account. When they build up, however, they make it difficult for users to get the information they need efficiently.

Strongpoint has a series of built-in tools to help Administrators to clean up their NetSuite account in an organized and efficient manner. With it, you can identify and safely deprecate unused customizations, unused scripts, unused saved searches and other technical debt.

Identify and safely eliminate technical debt

Improve system usability and adoption

Maintain tight, secure access controls

Strongpoint's customization impact reports are the data-driven cousin to the ERD, which we mentioned above. Impact reports show you everything that could be affected if you change a customization — giving you the confidence of knowing whether or not something will break if you deprecate it. 

Here's a short demo:

NetSuite saved searches are so easy to create — but deleting them when you're done with them is an extra step most admins don't have time for. The result is that, over time, they accumulate, making them one of the most common forms of technical debt in NetSuite. 

Strongpoint comes with out-of-the-box tools for reviewing old saved searches and identifying what's safe to get rid of. Then, we automate the time-consuming parts of cleanup, and collect every step in audit-ready reporting. 

Here's a blog post walking you through how it works. 

Understanding who has access to what is critical to data security and regulatory compliance. But over time, NetSuite's roles and permissions can get extremely complex. 

Strongpoint gives you tools to review access controls in NetSuite and identify redundant roles and permissions that can lead to SOX compliance or segregation of duties violations. 

Here's a screenshot of one of our standard reports, showing all role assignments that have no active logins in the last six months — one example of what we call 'low hanging fruit' that can likely be deleted as part of an access cleanup project:

 

Get the eBook

NetSuite System Notes vs. Strongpoint Change Logs

Without Strongpoint, the best way to track critical changes in NetSuite is by using system notes and audit logs. However, system notes have their shortcomings — as many admins know from experience, it often seems like they provide both too much information, and not enough.

Download our ebook for a look at how Strongpoint's system notes close these gaps. 

system notes ebook

Next Step: Automatic Impact Analysis

Great documentation makes it easy to see the impact of a proposed change. Strongpoint takes this a step further, allowing you to automate the process and build time-saving policies based on actual risk.