5 Best Practices for Report Management in NetSuite OpenAir

So your company has replaced your many spreadsheets with NetSuite OpenAir PSA with the promise of better reporting for sharing data across the enterprise. All levels of the organization from executives to project and resource managers are excited about starting to see reports. Organizations must decide how to approach the management of the report creation and sharing process. Does everyone get trained and let folks start creating reports? Or does the organization implement a more centralized approach to controlling the report creation process? Short term it may be difficult to hold off the desire for reports, but it may be prudent to do so in order to implement report management best practice strategy.

Here are five best practices TOP Step has implemented to help our customers manage the report creation and sharing processes:

1. Use a centralized report user to create corporate approved reports
   This can be a named power user or we have seen a licensed user created just to create and manage reports. Super users proxy in to create/update reports. This method controls report creation and content of corporate-wide reports.
2. Create a folder structure for organizing reports
   Folders are a great option for organizing reports. You can embed folders within folders. You can also share a folder with users or assignment groups, so each report does not need to be shared.
3. Designate custom calculations with an ‘asterisk’ or another symbol
   Custom calculations are great tools for generating custom values within summary reports but can get lost with standard summary values in field list. Identifying custom calculations can be helpful when creating reports. Having custom calculations with a description also helps define custom calculation.
4. Added a report description to report form ‘Notes’ field
   Within each report form, there is a Notes field that can be used to store a description of the report. The Notes field can be added to report list views to help end users select the correct report.
5. Monitor report metrics
   Within report views, there are key metrics such as ‘Total runs’ and ‘Last run’ which are great metric for which reports are most popular or reports not being run. Under new ‘Status’ tab, there are other key metrics such as ‘Average runtime’, ‘Max runtime’, and other metrics.

The strategy of how to quench the data thirst of the organization is key to rolling out accurate, relevant reports to the users who most need them. Each organization will have different approaches to managing reports. As long as you implement a strategy and enforce the processes across the organization, you can be confident your NetSuite OpenAir PSA system will deliver accurate data to those who depend on it to do their job.