For the last few months I've been working with a food manufacturer that had all the usual ingredients of a modern NetSuite reporting stack.
- SuiteAnalytics.
- Custom Financial Reports.
- Saved Searches.
- Budgets.
- Spreadsheets.
- Board Packs.
- Lots of smart people.
Yet there were still management questions that were surprisingly difficult to answer consistently. Questions like:
- Why is EBITDA down?
- Which sites are driving the result?
- Is labour growing faster than sales?
- Where does every dollar of Net Sales actually go?
- Is margin improving, or are we simply selling more?
- Which costs are consuming the gains we've made elsewhere?
None of these are particularly unusual questions.
In fact, they're exactly the sort of questions manufacturing and retail businesses ask every week.
The challenge wasn't a lack of data. The challenge wasn't a lack of reporting tools. The challenge was that the business logic required to answer those questions consistently was scattered across reports, searches, workbooks, spreadsheets and people's heads.
Over the last few weeks we've quietly deployed something called SpeedLedger.
No new software. No external data warehouse. No Power BI. No AFP&B. No Oracle Analytics Warehouse. Just NetSuite.
The idea is deceptively simple: Instead of reporting from the accounting ledger, create a management ledger. A reporting layer that translates transactions into business concepts such as:
- Net Sales
- Gross Margin
- Employment Costs
- CODB
- EBITDA
- NPBT
and then makes those concepts available consistently across every workbook and dashboard. The result isn't necessarily more reports. It's fewer arguments about the numbers.
One version of Gross Margin.
One version of EBITDA.
One definition of CODB.
One financial truth.
I'm not suggesting this replaces SuiteAnalytics, AFP&B, Power BI or any of the other excellent tools available in the Oracle ecosystem. In fact, those tools become more valuable when they are sitting on top of a consistent business reporting model. But it has made me wonder: How many NetSuite reporting projects are actually reporting tool projects? And how many are really semantic modelling projects disguised as reporting projects? Because after more than twenty years working with ERP systems, I've become increasingly convinced that the hardest reporting problem isn't building dashboards. It's agreeing on what the numbers mean.