Today we're going to discuss a very common question that we get from our our clients quite often. What is the difference between NetSuite Planning and Budgeting and NetSuite Core?

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Well, one of the first differences between NetSuite Planning and Budgeting and NetSuite Core is that network Planning and Budgeting allows you to hold multiple budgets and multiple forecasts.  Where NetSuite Core you can only store one budget or a forecast a single budget or a single forecast. The next piece and in NetSuite planning and budgeting is key differences advanced scenario modeling capabilities.  Within NetSuite Planning and Budgeting we can have multiple versions of a single scenario. For example, we can have a forecast that is a what if one, what if two, what if three and these are basically unlimited.

We can see we can set up as many different versions as we want. Another example of the different versions would be the income statement.  An income statement for example by you know whether the economy is a strong economy a medium economy or a weak economy.  There is no scenario modeling capabilities like this in in the NetSuite Core.

Network planning budgeting allows alternate hierarchy slash rollups across all dimensions slash segments and what exactly are ultimate hierarchies.  Alternate hierarchies are really a different way to view this data. For example, in an account dimension you might have an income statement roll up for the accounting group or the sales group. Then you might have a different income statement roll up for the finance group. It's essentially the same members but just grouped differently and rolled up differently again.

Another example is you might have a department roll up where you roll up the departments by function by sales or marketing or engineering. Then you might have have a different type of rollup you might roll up departments by geography. Let's say those departments were in different geographical locations, it could be on the product dimension you can roll up products by different groupings and different skus.

In NetSuite Core you're generally just allowed to have a single hierarchy in each segment or each dimension. So there's a core hierarchy and that's what you use to roll up in NetSuite Planning and Budgeting. You can report by multiple dimensions slash segments and what that means is you can report by accounts and you can report by class and department and location all in one single report. Where in NetSuite Core you can generally just report by a single segment at a time. You can report by account or report by class or by location but you can't combine them all together.

Network Planning and Budgeting has advanced reporting capabilities around the creation of books. Basically, books are a group of reports such as a quarterly deck or a monthly deck or an annual report you can create these type of books and combine 5, 10, 15 or as many reports as you wanted. Those reports can be run on a manual basis or on a like by clicking a button. They can also be automated, and those books can also be emailed out to various stakeholders.

Advanced reporting capabilities such as book reporting generation is available on the NetSuite Core.  Another key difference between NetSuite Planning and Budgeting and NetSuite Core is in NetSuite Planning and Budgeting data is captured at a summary level.  Typically at a weekly slash monthly level the most common in fact is the captured data at a monthly level. NetSuite Core the data is captured at a transactional level per transaction. For example, if you need to run a report that was more transactional type of report, you would have to run that out a NetSuite Core.  You could not run that out of NetSuite Planning and Budgeting however NetSuite Planning and Budgeting does have drill true capabilities which would allow you to drill into a number within NetSuite Planning and Budgeting. Then you can drill back into NetSuite Core and then that would bring up the transactions that made up the summarized number.

This outlines the main difference between NetSuite Planning and Budgeting and NetSuite Core. If anyone has any further questions, please feel free to reach out to me.