NetSuite Saved searches are an extremely powerful tool for making the best out of Oracle’s NetSuite cloud ERP software. These saved searches allow you to customize the way you analyze your business, find interesting information on customers and products, discover trends and issues, and much more.

NetSuite has many built in saved searches to start with and they differ from Reports. Reports work fine for displaying and reporting data for large chunks of time (saved searches can be used for this too, more on that later) and for a great number of situations is the preferred way to go. But Reports have limitations and are clunky to work with.

I use saved searches for over 90% of my reports and data analysis in NetSuite. Plus, I use these for a great deal more too.

How Does a Saved Search Work?

A saved search starts with choosing a search type. NetSuite has a long list of search types to choose from. The one you use depends on the type of information you are looking for or looking at. The ones I use most often for eCommerce are Transaction and Item. Customer service often uses Case and purchasing commonly uses Vendor and Inventory Detail among other ones. Each department can use the search types best suited for their specific needs.

Choosing the search type will determine what fields are available when customizing your search. Sometimes it proves difficult to find the precise field you want to include in your search.

NOTE: All information listed here is under the assumption that you are using an ADMINISTRATOR role when creating and editing the saved searches.

Once you’ve chosen the search type you need to name your search and give it an ID (so you can save it and use it again).

Then it’s off to the most important parts of the saved search are: criteria and results.

With criteria, you narrow down what exactly you want to search. For example, with a transaction search you would choose sales order, purchase order, or work order depending on what area of the business you want to analyze.

Results is where you decide what fields you want to see, how they will be displayed, and sorted.

Criteria is crucial for getting only the info you want; results lets you display the results in a useful manner.

The other parts of a saved search include “Highlighting”, “Available Filters”, “Audience”, “Roles”, and “Email”. Not all of these are needed for each search.

Highlighting – lets you highlight or mark a row in your results based on criteria. Ex: add a yellow background for all orders over $500.

Available Filters – useful for when you have a search with items that can be grouped, say sales orders by state or date range.

Audience – here you select what roles and employees can use this search. If it is a public search, you can allow the audience to edit the saved search.

Roles – lets you choose the type of view each role has for this saved search. Not something I commonly use.

Email – here you can have the search results emailed to specific people on a schedule or when records are created or updated. This feature is especially handy for actions that happen on a semi-regular basis but not all the time. Examples would be cases, product reviews, etc.

Check out NetSuite advanced saved searches to improve your business analysis.