NetSuite tips – navigating through the application

Over the next few months, we will be continuing to write a series of short guides for our NetSuite customers, providing them with hints and tips all designed to make their lives easier with regards to the use of NetSuite. This month’s guide is all about how to make navigating around NetSuite as quick and easy as possible to help your staff make sure that the information they need really is right at their fingertips, as soon as it’s needed.
With any software application, while the capabilities are often there right from the start, they may take a bit of getting used to. NetSuite has been designed to have an intuitive, easy-to-use interface, but if you can teach your staff some new tips and tricks, you should be able to improve their productivity even more.

Customise your favourites

Naturally, when you have people from multiple roles accessing NetSuite, they have different tasks to do, and so will frequently use specific pages to carry out their own jobs. Therefore, it can pay dividends for staff to set up their own shortcuts to the pages they know they will need to use most often.
This works just like setting favourite websites in an internet browser. All a user has to do is select the Star icon at the top left of the menu bar when on the desired page and choose ‘Add to Shortcuts’. They will then be given the option to choose a name for the shortcut and save it. Once they’ve refreshed the page or navigated to another page, it will appear in the shortcuts menu, allowing users to navigate to the page directly, wherever they are in NetSuite.
If you ever want to change the order in which your shortcuts appear, rename them, or remove any of them, simply hover over the favourites star, select “set up shortcuts”, make the necessary changes and hit “save”.
NetSuite history and favourites screenshot

Revisiting your history

Similarly, employees are likely to find over the course of a task that they frequently need to move back and forth between previously-visited pages. For example, a user may have navigated through the menu system to enter a sales order. But later, when they need to access that page again, it can be tedious to navigate through the same set of menus again.
Fortunately, this isn’t necessary thanks to NetSuite’s Recent Records feature. This can be found next to the Star icon – it looks like a clock – and when selected, will show you the last twelve records recently created, modified, or viewed, enabling you to bring them up again with just a single click.
If you have permission, an edit link is available that you can click to open the record in Edit mode.
Please note, the recent records feature is role specific – so if you use multiple roles in NetSuite you must bear this in mind.

Keyboard shortcuts – cut out the effort

If you use software such as Windows, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the range of standard shortcuts, such as Ctrl+X to cut and Ctrl+Z to undo an action – and you’ll appreciate how much faster this is than using the mouse to navigate to the appropriate selection on the display. But did you know there are also a range of quick shortcuts available for NetSuite users that can help to narrow down their searches and bring up the results they want?
For instance, when selecting date ranges, instead of typing out the date or selecting from the pop-up calendar in the entry field, try using some of the following shortcuts:

  • ‘t’ – This will automatically populate the field with today’s date.
  • ‘y’ – This will automatically populate the field with yesterday’s date.
  • ‘Shift + t’ – This will fill in tomorrow’s date.
  • ‘m’ – This will fill in the last day of the month.

These shortcuts are also very useful for scheduling, entering data, and completing forms.
Tip: Did you know that + and – will move the date forward or backwards one day at a time?

Viewing reports

There are also a few tricks that make viewing reports that little bit easier:
•    Press ‘Page Up’ on your keyboard to go to the previous page of a report.
•    Press ‘Page Down’ to go to the next page of a report.
•    Press ‘Home’ to go to the first page of a report.
•    Press ‘End’ to go to the last page of a report.

Sorting and filtering lists

Finding the records you need quickly can be made much simpler through the use of NetSuite’s sorting and filtering tools.
Lists are available in NetSuite for all major record types, including customers, transactions, opportunities and events. To sort these lists by a particular column, you can click the relevant column header, which will list the results in ascending order. Click again to view them in descending order.
And to change the type of list results you’re viewing, check out the footer section that appears at the very bottom of every page. This contains a View drop-down list, which allows you to instantly change the columns of data in the list, or to filter the results to the parameters of your choice.
Use the Customise View button in the bottom right to set up the columns you wish to be included in the list and to set up filters.
For more information and tips on the use of NetSuite, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with one of our experts.
Feel free to share this guide with your colleagues or comment below.
View our other NetSuite guides:
January – “NetSuite tips – Making search easier
March – “NetSuite tips – Understanding the dashboards
April – “NetSuite tips – Creating custom KPIs
May – “NetSuite tips – creating and editing KPI scorecards

June – “NetSuite tips – how to set up email alerts

July – “NetSuite tips – customising and sending emails from records

August – “NetSuite tips – setting up reminders

November – “NetSuite tips: An overview of the changes to NetSuite’s user interface

Related

< BACK TO ALL NEWS ARTICLES
Latest
More Information

Stephen Adamson

NoBlue

[email protected]

(+44) 115 758 8888
Stay Connected

We make a selection of our blog’s most relevant news, a section dedicated to what we know best: Cloud Business Management Solutions. Sign up to our newsletter.