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NetSuite adds new functionality for the software industry

New Features Enable Software Companies to Treat Billing as a Strategic Advantage, Expand Globally and Tighten Financial Controls

SAN MATEO, Calif.—May 18, 2016—NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), the industry's leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP and omnichannel commerce software suites, today announced a multitude of new features targeting the software industry, including billing, revenue recognition, Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) and global capabilities. These new features are designed to help software companies adapt to any business model by unifying billing with revenue recognition and expand globally by increasing operational efficiency, streamlining financial reporting, deepening local and global compliance and localizing business processes. The enhancements announced today demonstrate NetSuite’s accelerated product innovation across all industries and for software in particular, at an unstoppable pace.

Software companies today face enormous pressure to innovate, both in their product and business model, where changes to traditional billing practices have forced the industry to adopt subscription- and usage-based billing. Meanwhile, many software companies are struggling to account for new service practices they’ve added to their business. Additionally, with software companies undergoing rapid growth and carrying high market valuations, managing that growth and maintaining compliance and auditability becomes a significant challenge.

NetSuite provides a scalable system that supports software companies in start-up mode, through rapid growth stages beyond their IPOs with a single system that can grow with the business, providing the first and last business system a software company will ever need. With NetSuite, software companies are well positioned for global expansion. Additionally, NetSuite’s robust internal controls and strong track record of businesses running NetSuite that have taken their companies public in recent years helps pave the way for companies as they march towards IPO. Robust financial reporting capabilities help businesses execute through a smooth auditing process, creating a win-win for both the businesses and their auditors.

“NetSuite has a long track record of supporting software companies throughout their evolution, from start-up, to fast-growth, to global enterprises,” said NetSuite Co-Founder, CTO and Chairman of the Board, Evan Goldberg. “These latest enhancements are a testament to our continued innovation and support for businesses in the software industry. With NetSuite, they can adapt and grow, knowing their business software will evolve with them and with the industry.”

Future-Proofing Billing Functionality for Any Business Model
Perhaps more than in any other industry, software companies confront rapid evolution in billing and revenue recognition. Today’s announcement of SuiteBilling enables software companies to make billing, traditionally a standardised task, into a strategic business function with:

  • A Core Framework, allowing for internal NetSuite subscription management, project and fulfillment modules to directly leverage core billing, revenue recognition and financial elements and processes via billing accounts and charge records.
  • Enhanced Order to Revenue, NetSuite’s superior and highly scalable order management functionality can process orders coming in from multiple channels and centralise them within one single system while advanced revenue management capabilities support multi-element arrangements.
  • Subscription Management, supporting subscription- and usage-based pricing models and rating (simple and advanced).
  • Unified, but Independent Approach, allowing invoicing and revenue recognition processes to work seamlessly together while meeting the specific independent needs of each process.
  • Rich, Customizable Customer Billing Portals, based on NetSuite’s industry-leading ecommerce platform, enable companies to deepen and expand customer relationships.

Reducing Risk, Easing Compliance
Rapid growth in the software industry demand rigid controls around accounting practices and risk management. The enhancements announced today deliver key benefits and features that expand on NetSuite’s Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) GRC capabilities with a focus on ensuring companies of all sizes have the ability to define role-specific access controls across their global organisations, track activity and configuration changes at a granular level and report on that activity, including proactive alerting related to business-specific exception criteria. Key improvements within NetSuite OneWorld that benefit software companies include:

  • Additional audit trails and searchability across all financially-relevant account setup pages.
  • Revenue recognition plan changes (within the Advanced Revenue Management module).
  • Custom financial layouts.
  • Enhanced security around the password reset process.

Managing Global Growth
As software companies expand across the globe, they confront new challenges with managing local currencies, languages and taxation rules while establishing multiple subsidiaries. The new enhancements announced today provide software companies with new features and functionality that address:

  • Global vendor management, enabling multi-company users to centralise and manage their global vendor relationships, including credit limits, across multiple companies and cleaning up duplicate vendor data from legacy systems by merging vendor records across subsidiaries.
  • Country-specific localizations, expanding on support for more than 100 countries tax calculation and reporting requirements, encompassing Czech Republic VAT Control Statement and Slovak Republic VAT Ledger Statement, which will allow global companies to meet the tax requirements of the countries in which they operate. Through NetSuite’s support for local tax calculation and reporting, changes in VAT transaction details in Belgium and Portugal, and similar upcoming changes in Spain and Hungary, are managed seamlessly, as NetSuite cloud ERP allows global companies to cope with such changes without business disruption.
  • Secondary books consolidation and financial reporting, allowing companies that are required to keep multiple sets of auditable financial results to satisfy specific GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) and international reporting requirements across their global business operations, enabling accountants and controllers to optimise financial period closing at a global level. For example, companies can maintain accounting records according to their corporate or headquarter location accounting policies in parallel to local accounting rules that may have different recognition timing or classification.

Today, more than 30,000 companies and subsidiaries depend on NetSuite to run complex, mission-critical business processes globally in the cloud. Since its inception in 1998, NetSuite has established itself as the leading provider of enterprise-ready cloud business management suites of enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and ecommerce applications for businesses of all sizes. Many FORTUNE 100 companies rely on NetSuite to accelerate innovation and business transformation. NetSuite continues its success in delivering the best cloud business management suites to businesses around the world, enabling them to lower IT costs significantly while increasing productivity, as the global adoption of the cloud accelerates.

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For more information about NetSuite please visit www.netsuite.co.uk.

NOTE: NetSuite and the NetSuite logo are registered service marks of NetSuite Inc. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.