The administrator’s role in NetSuite is to tailor, maintain, and continuously optimize the system to meet the needs of the business. As such, NetSuite allows multiple users to be enabled as system administrators to help oversee day to day operational activities. Oftentimes, however, to incorporate proper system controls and delegations of authority, additional tools and reports are needed to monitor the activities, updates, and modifications performed by system administrators.
While NetSuite doesn’t keep historical system notes for every modification performed within the system (such as feature enablement and accounting-preference updates), it can however provide reports that show actions taking place when users are logged in as administrators. This can serve as a baseline to have an auditable tracking of users logged in with administrative roles and the associated tasks performed in the live production environment.
First, begin by using a system note saved search. This allows users to choose any type of record from the system notes to review updates made by system administrators, including accounting transactions, entities, and custom records. When building your saved search, we recommend adding the following criteria:
- Who set it – the user whose updates you’d like to review
- The role – administrator to identify updates made while in this role
- The date – the date range you are looking for (also helpful to narrow down the results you receive back)
- The context – User Interface (UI)
It is recommended to select ‘UI’ as the initial context to see changes made within the system directly by users themselves.
While it’s sufficient to use UI as the criteria to get a sample population, if the user has additional customizations (such as SuiteFlows or SuiteScripts) running in NetSuite, we recommend using additional contexts to identify the full population of updates made.
Next, define the values on the system note saved search. Set the ‘old value’ and ‘new value’ to see what changes were made by administrators. In addition, add the ‘Type’ and ‘Field’ values to provide the specifics regarding changes made. Lastly, we recommend sorting the report results by most recent, so the most current results are displayed at the top of the report.
In the results (in the ‘Role’ column), the role is set to ‘administrator’ and there is a record of what was modified. If the administrator was modifying workflows for example, this report would display a row in the results with a hyperlink back to the workflow edited.
Note: The ‘record’ column will often contain hyperlinks to point back to the record that changed, although not all records will have this association (e.g., the accounting preference change above in which ‘Invoice in Advance of Fulfillment’ was enabled by the Administrator by being set from false to true).
While not everything can be captured by system notes, this functionality serves as a good baseline to see what certain administrators are doing within the system while providing visibility into what users are doing and what they shouldn’t be doing.
For more tips on using NetSuite’s saved search function, contact our NetSuite experts by filling out the form below, or visit our NetSuite page.
