NetSuite tips – making search easier

Over the next few months, we’re going to be writing 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 NetSuite’s search capabilities and how you can use it to find the documents you are looking for much more quickly and easily.
One of the great things about NetSuite is that is can collate information from all over your organisation into one place, where it’s easy to find and work with the latest information, without having to chase files all around the office.
But to make the most of this, you’ll need to know how to find the right information quickly. As with anything online, whether it’s shopping on Amazon or finding information on Google, knowing how to make an effective search can save you a huge amount of time and make life easier. So here are our tips on how to make this easier.

Search NetSuite directly from your Chrome browser

If you’re using the Chrome web browser, you may have noticed one of its great little time-savers is the ability to search Google or any other engine directly from the address bar. But did you know you can do this with NetSuite too?
Simply open Chrome’s settings (click the three horizontal lines at the top right of the window and choose ‘Settings’), select ‘Manage search engines’ and scroll to the bottom. You should see three boxes, with ‘add a new search engine’ in the leftmost one. All you have to do is enter the following into the boxes.
Add new search engine: NetSuite
Keyword: ns
URL: https://system.netsuite.com/app/common/search/ubersearchresults.nl?quicksearch=T&searchtype=Uber&frame=be&Uber_NAMEtype=KEYWORDSTARTSWITH
&Uber_NAME=%s
Then click ‘Done’.
Now when you enter “ns” in Chrome’s address bar and press space or tab, the browser will respond by putting “Search NetSuite:” in the address bar. Type your query and press enter and Chrome will bring up search results in NetSuite. You can still use record identifiers in the search string you enter in the address box (e.g. case: 123456, etc).

Some useful search strings

NetSuite’s Global Search function is an extremely powerful tool that can bring up anything on the system – from transactions to individual customer details. But you can increase the efficiency of your results by knowing what exact strings to use.
For instance, if you add an underscore within your search, it will return results for any character in that location – so searching for ‘Jo_n’ will provide results for John, Joan, etc. And by replacing the underscore with a % symbol, it expands the matches to a string of characters, so all results beginning with ‘Jo’ and ending in ‘n’, such as ‘Johnson’, also show up.
You can narrow down the type of results you see by entering the first few characters of the record type as a prefix, followed by a colon – so add ‘cust:’ to the beginning of your search query to see only customer records, or ‘invo:’ for invoices. To go directly to a customer dashboard, use the dash: prefix with a customer’s name.
If you would like to see results with only exact matches of your search terms, then enclose the search string in quotation marks. For example, searching cust:”john” would bring up only customers with the name John. Customers containing John, such as Johnson, would not be included in the results.
Users can also search for phone numbers, record IDs and much more, as well as set up custom settings that alter how the results are displayed.
You can use OR in order to search multiple text strings, so enter “John OR Jon” to search for records containing either of these keywords.
Tip: Did you know that you can quickly move the cursor to the search field by pressing “Alt-G” on your keyboard?

Utilising saved searches

You can take much of the tedium out of hunting down records with NetSuite’s saved search function, which enables you to reuse parameters over and over again if you know there will be a frequently-used set of terms.
But simply saving your definitions to use again is just the start. You can also share these parameters with other users, have the results sent automatically via email to selected recipients or at set times, or export them in formats including Excel and PDF docs.
Learning how to make the most of saved searches can be one of the best things you can do to boost your efficiency. But don’t forget to clean up your records occasionally, as if you’re not careful, you can end up with so many saved records it’s hard to remember which one you need, thereby defeating the purpose of the exercise.
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:
February – “NetSuite tips – Navigating through the application
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

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Stephen Adamson

NoBlue

[email protected]

(+44) 115 758 8888
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