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Does your accounting team spend more time on manual work than business analysis?
Do disparate systems limit your financial insights? Is your chart of accounts no longer aligned with business needs? If you answered “yes,” a next-generation general ledger solution is overdue.
Transitioning from traditional general ledgers brings immense technology and process upgrades. But it also causes financial disruption across accounting workflows, reporting structures, and consolidation processes.
This is where a cloud-based integrated solution like NetSuite General Ledger steps in. It goes beyond automating manual efforts to delivering unparalleled flexibility, global capabilities and rich analytics.
In this complete guide, we’ll explore what NetSuite General Ledger is, its key capabilities, top benefits, and how it solves common accounting challenges.
What is NetSuite General Ledger?
The general ledger is the foundation of any accounting system - it records and categorizes all financial transactions a business performs. NetSuite General Ledger takes this core accounting component to the next level by adding layers of automation, customization, and real-time visibility.
NetSuite General Ledger goes beyond basic debit-credit transaction recording. It delivers a centralized platform that adapts to any business structure, integrates with banks globally, reconciles accounts automatically, manages multiple reporting standards, and enables real-time budget vs. actuals—plus much more.
In short, NetSuite General Ledger eliminates the constraints of traditional general ledgers. It gives finance teams the flexibility, efficiency, and actionable insights they need in today’s dynamic business landscape.
Key Capabilities of NetSuite General Ledger
NetSuite General Ledger comes packed with features to transform accounting. Let’s explore some of the top capabilities:
Flexible Chart of Accounts
The chart of accounts provides the framework for capturing all financial transactions. NetSuite offers immense flexibility here, with simplified yet customizable account structures.
You can tailor account types, add various sub-accounts, and modify them as your business evolves. NetSuite also supports both parent-child and segmented chart of accounts within the same system simultaneously. This adaptability ensures the general ledger aligns with your financial reporting needs.
Multi-Book Accounting
Multi-book accounting enables the management of financials across different standards, taxation rules, currencies, or consolidation methods without repetitive manual work.
NetSuite automates the complex task of keeping books compliant with GAAP, IFRS, and other standards. Pre-built mapping of primary and secondary chart of accounts also eliminates duplication. As a result, you save significant time maintaining and consolidating books.
Robust Reporting Segments
Viewing financial data across different business dimensions is vital for insights. NetSuite General Ledger enables creating unlimited “reporting segments” for analysis.
Standard segments include subsidiaries, departments, classes, and location. You can add custom segments like customer, product, region, sales rep, channel etc. This multidimensional perspective was never possible with rigid traditional GL systems.
Banking and Reconciliation
It is extremely tedious to import bank statements and reconcile entries manually. NetSuite automates this by connecting to all major global banks to import the latest bank and credit card data.
Intelligent matching algorithms compare imported transactions with existing records. It auto-reconciles all matched entries and flags exceptions for accountants. This eliminates weeks wasted on manual reconciliation tasks.
Budgetary Controls
NetSuite enables real-time tracking of actual expenses and revenues against budgets for continuous monitoring. You can import budgets from NetSuite Planning and Budgeting or other systems.
With real-time budget vs. actual variance analysis, you can course correct quickly rather than waiting until month's end to identify issues. This gives immense flexibility to accounting managers.
Process Automation
Manual journal entries and consolidations eat up countless hours. NetSuite General Ledger has built-in automation across key processes to free up finance teams.
You can configure rules to auto-calculate amortization, depreciations, accrual allocations, currency conversions, journal creation from billing and more. Approval workflows also govern the posting of large journals. This takes away the grunt work from accountants.
Benefits of NetSuite General Ledger
Let’s explore the major ways NetSuite General Ledger benefits accounting teams and financial leaders:
Increased Productivity
When you can automate high-effort tasks like reconciliations, reporting, and consolidations, productivity dramatically increases. Finance staff gain time to focus on value-add analysis rather than mundane ledger maintenance. Studies show finance productivity improving by 20-30% with NetSuite.
Enriched Reporting & Planning
Robust multi-dimensional reporting, real-time budget tracking, and automated financial consolidations together transform how organizations plan and report. You gain the agility to course correct quickly and the insights to optimize performance.
Reduced Risk & Complexity
Automated checks and balances improve compliance. Features like auto-reconciliation, transaction matching, and journal approval workflows prevent errors or fraud. Custom segments simplify complex reporting structures prone to mistakes. Together they improve accuracy and reduce audit risks.
Lean Finance Function
Automating transaction processing and reconciliations with NetSuite means you need fewer accounting resources. Leaner finance teams can manage a growing business without continually expanding headcount. This is especially key as companies go global but don’t want runaway costs.
Platform for Growth
NetSuite General Ledger easily scales to support business growth and complexity. As subsidiaries get added or new revenue streams open up, NetSuite adapts seamlessly without needing new systems. You gain a unified platform to manage expansion and change.
Top Accounting Challenges that NetSuite GL Solves
Now that we’ve seen the capabilities and benefits let’s explore how NetSuite General Ledger solves the most pressing accounting difficulties:
Manual Work Overload
Finance teams often struggle with an overwhelming amount of manual work—creating consolidated reports, generating period-end journals, performing account reconciliations, etc. These staff-intensive activities have a cascading impact through delays, errors, poorer insights, and limited strategic contribution.
NetSuite automation across journal entries, allocations, reconciliations, and consolidations slashes manual workloads. Accounting teams now focus on delivering business partnerships.
Disconnected Systems
Many accounting software applications don’t “talk,” limiting data flows between sub-ledgers, consolidation tools, planning systems etc. Accountants end up moving data across files or even manually reentering it. Integrating data across systems is a considerable challenge.
As an integrated cloud ERP, NetSuite delivers seamless flows across broader financial processes from sub-ledgers, billing, inventory etc, into the general ledger—no more fragmented systems.
Rigid Structures
Traditional general ledgers have rigid account and subaccount structures that quickly become limitations. As business needs change, accounting managers lack the flexibility to adapt the chart of accounts, reporting codes, etc., resulting in workarounds.
NetSuite's general ledger enables evolving GL and reporting segments on the fly to match business needs without data migration hassles. As needs change, you gain unmatched agility.
Limited Reporting Insights
Basic P&L reporting by traditional GL systems falls short of the richer, customized views needed for performance decisions. The lack of paper trails around journals also raises audit risks and failures. Both shortcomings result from narrow GL reporting.
Robust analytics, paper trail audit logs, and role-based dashboards deliver the detailed visibility modern businesses expect from their general ledger. Planning, reporting and decisions all become data-driven.
Difficult Global Consolidation
For companies with international subsidiaries, consolidating financial reports across different currencies, taxation rules, and accounting standards is an extremely painful endeavor. But most general ledgers can’t handle this complexity.
NetSuite multi-book accounting seamlessly meets multi-national compliance needs while automating consolidations across global subsidiaries—there is no manual manipulation between standards.
By resolving these five challenges that accounting teams routinely grapple with, NetSuite General Ledger fundamentally transforms how finance functions operate to deliver agility, insights and efficiency.
NetSuite General Ledger Vs. Other GL Softwares
Let’s conclude by reflecting on how NetSuite General Ledger is positioned compared to alternatives:
NetSuite GL Vs. QuickBooks
Entry-level solutions like QuickBooks offer basic GL functionality but cannot match with NetSuite General Ledger's flexibility and automation for growing businesses. They lack custom segments, robust reporting, global consolidations, and process workflows crucial as companies scale. NetSuite delivers enterprise-grade capabilities that far surpass basic accounting systems.
NetSuite GL Vs. Spreadsheets
Many companies, especially smaller ones, often default to using spreadsheets for managing ledgers, consolidations, and reporting. However, spreadsheets have severe limitations around data accuracy, transparency, workflow management and processing volumes that make them unreliable as companies grow. NetSuite eliminates the rigidity and high error risk associated with spreadsheet-based accounting.
NetSuite GL Vs. Legacy On-Premise Softwares
While traditional on-premise solutions like SAP or Oracle Financials provide extensive functions, they have significant downsides. High upfront costs, long implementations, ongoing maintenance needs, limited flexibility/agility, and disjointed data plague legacy systems. NetSuite's unified cloud platform overcomes these limitations.
NetSuite GL Vs. Other Integrated Cloud ERP
While standalone cloud accounting solutions have emerged, they typically focus narrowly on core accounting. NetSuite differentiated itself by providing an integrated cloud ERP that extends far beyond accounting to areas like CRM, e-commerce, inventory, service delivery, etc. This unified data and process orchestration is a key competitive advantage.
Conclusion and Next Steps
In closing, NetSuite General Ledger transforms traditional accounting with game-changing capabilities in process automation, multidimensional reporting, global compliance, real-time analytics and more. Leading finance teams now use NetSuite as a strategic platform to deliver efficiency, insights and value throughout the business.
Ready to join them? Reach out for a demo tailored to your accounting needs and priorities. We will help you identify where NetSuite perfectly aligns with your challenges and roadmap. The time for the next-generation general ledger is now.
