Wish you had a NetSuite expert at your fingertips? Even better, what if that expert was already familiar with your particular business, employees, and NetSuite environment?
That is exactly what our Managed Service Plan provides: a dedicated point of contact who is available to you when you need him.
It can be tough to really know what to expect, though, if you’ve never experienced how great an MSP is. Are you wondering what it actually feels like to be an Anchor Group MSP client?
Anchor Group is a top Oracle NetSuite partner, and BigCommerce partner that provides implementation and customization services to B2B and B2C businesses across various industries!
You might be thinking to yourself, “That sounds awesome, but I wish I could know for sure that it would be worth the cost.” Luckily, we have an example of a typical day-in-the-life of one of our MSP clients so you can see a little better for yourself. Since there wasn’t a video call on this particular day, all the communication between the client CEO (Bob) and his Anchor Group consultant (Dom) can be seen in the email thread below. For the sake of our client's privacy, we have removed the company name and other sensitive information from this thread.
From: Bob (Anchor Group Client)
To: Dominick Meyer (Anchor Group NetSuite Consultant)
Hey Dom,
Yesterday I was talking with Susan. She was complaining about how much work it takes to follow up on overdue invoices. It seems like the main issue is that it takes her over a minute to find out how many days overdue an invoice is. She runs all our AR herself, so she can’t really delegate this grunt work to someone else.
Is there any way we could get NetSuite to just put that number automatically on the invoice PDF?
Bob
From: Dominick Meyer (Anchor Group NetSuite Consultant)
To: Bob (Anchor Group Client)
Hi Bob,
This sounds like a wonderful opportunity to make the system work for you!
I threw together a quick search to see how many invoices make it past 1 week overdue: about 160 per month.
Based on the estimate you shared of one minute+ per invoice, that could be 3hrs/ month of employee time saved. More as your company grows. No wonder Susan was frustrated by this task! This project should give you fantastic ROI.
Yes, we can get a Days Overdue value displayed on the Invoice. But first I’d like us to pause and think about why Susan is printing these invoices one at a time in the first place.
Is she printing the PDF in order to send an email reminder to the customers of the overdue payment?
Is there any reason not to automate the whole reminder process so that emails go out for overdue invoices with no work from Susan at all?
Regards,
Dom
From: Bob (Anchor Group Client)
To: Dominick Meyer (Anchor Group NetSuite Consultant)
Hey Dom,
Ooh, great question! I chatted with Susan and she realized that automatic reminders would work for 90% of our customers. But there are a few dozen big corporate clients where she wants to stay personally involved with any emails we send them.
Could we automate the reminders for all but the corporate customers? That would be sweet!
We would still want the days overdue to show up on the PDFs, whether they were printed manually or sent as some sort of robot process.
Bob
From: Dominick Meyer (Anchor Group NetSuite Consultant)
To: Bob (Anchor Group Client)
Hi Bob,
Makes sense that there are a few high-touch / white-glove relationships that Susan doesn’t want to trust to an automation. Yes, we should be able to automate the 90% and leave the 10% for her to handle manually.
How about we talk through the logic for the automatic reminders during our regular 10:30 meeting this Thursday? Could Susan join us for that meeting? I’m sure she will have valuable context to share since she is the one doing it manually today.
Since we already know we will need it, I can get a jumpstart now on making Days Overdue to show up on the invoice. I’ve just got a few clarifying questions below:
Days Overdue Calculation
Would it work for the date to be calculated based on today’s date whenever the invoice is printed?
For instance: Invoice X has a due date of Jan 15th. Today, Jan 25th, Susan prints a PDF of the invoice. The Days Overdue number would be 10 (number of days between Jan 25th and Jan 10th). If she prints a PDF of that same invoice tomorrow, Jan 26th, the Days Overdue number would be 11.
Going this route, it wouldn’t actually be a stored value on the Invoice, since it changes daily.
Placement on the PDF Template
Any preferences on where the Days Overdue value goes on the Invoice?
I mocked up a few location ideas on the Invoice:
I’m guessing we should only display this value on the PDF when the invoice is at least 1 day overdue. Does that make sense to you?
Formatting
Any preferences here on how it looks? Font color? Maybe something contrasty and alarming?
Best,
Dom,
From: Bob (Anchor Group Client)
To: Dominick Meyer (Anchor Group NetSuite Consultant)
Hey Dom,
You have no idea how excited Susan is by this project. Yes, she will definitely be at the Thursday meeting.
Bob
From: Dominick Meyer (Anchor Group NetSuite Consultant)
To: Bob (Anchor Group Client)
Hey Bob,
Alright!
I expect this Days Overdue task to use about 3 hours of your MSP budget by the time it’s all tested and deployed. Do you approve?
One of our developers (John, whom you have worked with before) is available to knock this out tomorrow, so if all goes well we can demo it to you on Thursday.
Dom
From: Bob (Anchor Group Client)
To: Dominick Meyer (Anchor Group NetSuite Consultant)
Dom,
Yes, task approved! John always does great work.
Thanks for jumping on so quickly.
Bob
If you found this email exchange intriguing and are interested in having a NetSuite expert like Dom be your dedicated point of contact for services and support, get in touch with our team today.
Dominick (Dom) Meyer, from the email exchange above, is just one of the many NetSuite experts you may collaborate with during your Managed Service Plan with Anchor Group. Below is a non-exhaustive list of a few other NetSuite experts who you might meet while working with us!
NetSuite Consultant
NetSuite Consultant
NetSuite Consultant
NetSuite Developer
NetSuite Developer
If you like what you're seeing here and want to work with a responsive team of experts like us, get in touch with our team to ask about your specific project! If you need a little more information first, you can check out our Managed Service Plans.
