Publishing Saved Searches to the Customer Center in NetSuite

One of the most underutlized features in NetSuite is publishing saved searches to the Customer Center. Creating a Public Saved Search works in the same way as creating a standard Saved Search, except that it allows you to share the information with your customers, partners or employees in real-time.

For example, here at ERP Guru we use publish saved searches in the Customer Center to keep our clients abreast on their projects. When they visit www.erpguru.com they can log-in to our site with the username and password we provided them. Once they are logged-in to the customer center, they are able to see their project status, and how many hours have been dedicated to what.

Our transparency allows our customers to feel secure that their project is moving forward, and it saves us time because we don’t need to send out weekly update emails.

You can publish any saved search to the customer center (transaction history, support cases), and below we will show you how to do it.

Step 1: Creating a new tab in the customer center
We need to create a tab in the customer center that will display our search.

1. Go to Lists --> Website --> Tabs-->New
2. Create a New Presentation Tab
3. Label it something like “My Results”
4. On the Audience tab select the role(s) that you would like to see this search, in our example, we would select Customer Center
5. Make sure to uncheck Display In Website
   
   

Don’t worry about the other fields, they are not relevant to what we are trying to accomplish.

Step 2: Create a Saved Search
Create a saved search as you normally would. It is important that you check the box Public so that the search is available for publishing.

Step 3: Publishing the search to the customer center

1. Go to Published Saved Search page which is the Classic Center type is under
   Lists --> Website --> Published Saved Search --> New
   
2. Give the Published Saved Search a title (this title is what your customers will click to access the information)
   
3. Specify the search from the drop down meny
4. In the Subcategory Of drop down select the newly created tab you created in the previous step. In our example we labeled it “My Results”, so that is what we would select in this case.
5. On the Audience tab select the role(s) that you would like to see this search, in our example, we would again select Customer Center.

Now, any customer who you have given access to can log-in to the customer center and view your published saved search!

As this topic is bigger and more complex than a single blog post we held a FREE training workshop on the topic. Please contact us if you would like the recording.

NetSuite and Gmail Integration Add-On

Good news for all the NetSuite and Gmail users out there. ERP Guru is working on a Gmail integration add-on that will be released soon.

Bookmark this space and visit often because whenever we have an update we will post it here.

We're also accepting pre-registration for the beta version.
Contact us if you are interested.

Screenshots

Screenshot 1: When this add-on is installed, you will see this button in the compose email window. Pushing the button opens up a box that lets you search for any type NetSuite record.



Screenshot 2: Search for any type of NetSuite record. Each tab represents a record type. Results of your search are displayed with check boxes and you can select the records you want your email to be attached to.

Formula Fields and Saved Searches

Formula Fields are a powerful tool that let you combine and manipulate multiple field values within NetSuite Saved Searches. In this post, I will show you how to manipulate date fields, though it should be noted that formula fields can also be used for currencies, numbers and even text fields.

For today, let's use the Formula (Date) field to manipulate the value of a Date/Time field. For example, let's say you want to know the last day of the month in which a transaction was created for an opportunity. First thing you would need to do is create a search for opportunities. Then, in the Results tab, choose Formula Field (type) in the field column of the Columns Sub-tab.

Click on the Formula column of the new field row and then click on the Set Formula button.

You will be presented with a pop-up that has three fields: Function, Field and Formula.

The Functions drop-down offer you multiple SQL functions. For our example we will choose "LAST_DAY" because we want to know the last day of the month in which a transaction was selected.

"Last_Day(date)" should now have automatically been copied in the Formula field.

Next, we will choose our field in the Field drop-down. In this case, we want the Date Created. Choosing it will copy the field into the Formula field.

You may notice that Fields are always surrounded by curly brackets, whereas Functions have parentheses at the end of their names.

Now if we were to leave the Formula as is, we would get an error. The (date) means nothing so you need to use your cut/paste skills to move the {datecreated} into the parentheses of the LAST_DAY function (see screenshot below).

Regardless of what information you are trying to manipulate you will always have to delete the word that's in the parentheses and move what's in the curly brackets into the parentheses. A complicated but necessary fact.

We're done! Click on the Set button, click Add (or Done) on the column you've added, click Preview on your search and voilà, for each opportunity you can now see the date of the last transaction.

To become comfortable with formula fields and their effects I suggest playing around on a Test Saved Search and experimenting. Formula Fields give you endless possibilities and only by playing around will you be able to see just how powerful this feature is.