5 Essential NetSuite Integrations for Your Business
NetSuite is one of the most popular ERP (enterprise resource planning) platforms on the market. For many organizations, NetSuite is the all-in-one platform through which every single process flows. The more data it has — and the more up to date it is — the better they can operate. But there are situations when the data you need isn’t in NetSuite. It might be in separate CRM software, in a project management tool used by a third-party collaborator, or even buried in someone’s email inbox.
In these situations, NetSuite integrations can get the data you need out of other tools and keep it centralized in NetSuite. Here’s how they work — and which ones you might need.
How do NetSuite integrations work?
A NetSuite integration is a piece of software that pushes data from NetSuite to other tools or vice-versa. It can automate parts of the business processes going through NetSuite, but it’s mainly about making sure your data is exactly where you need, no matter how many tools are involved in a workflow.
Not all integrations are created equal. NetSuite has several built-in integrations that allow users to connect it to other tools without paying for a third-party integration platform. These integrations include:
- NetSuite Connector: This tool integrates NetSuite with common e-commerce platforms like Shopify and eBay, as well as tools like Salesforce.
- SuiteCloud Platform Integration: Software developers and engineers can use this platform to design, test, and deploy custom integrations.
- NetSuite Data Warehouse: This platform is used to centralize data from multiple NetSuite apps, imported CSV files, and databases like Snowflake and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
But these methods can be limited, and won’t suit every organization.
A third-party integration platform allows organizations to integrate NetSuite with other tools in a way that suits them. Here are just a few examples of third-party integration providers for NetSuite:
- Unito: A true 2-way sync platform, Unito allows users of all technical backgrounds to build flows between NetSuite and over 50 tools. It creates 2-way relationships between work items so they’re created automatically in all tools and kept up to date as you work.
- Zapier: An automation platform used to create simple one-way automations between tools. This allows the creation of work items in other tools to create new work items in NetSuite, and vice-versa.
- Tray.io: An iPaaS (integration platform as a service), this is an all-in-one platform for automating all sorts of tools with NetSuite. While it offers hundreds of integrations, they’re not often as deep as those offered by other solutions.
The 5 best NetSuite integrations for your business
While you’ll eventually want to integrate your entire tool stack with NetSuite, you’ll often need to prioritize some tools, especially if you’re testing out a new integration platform. With that in mind, here are the tools you should integrate with NetSuite first.
Chat and meeting tools
How many of your projects start in a Slack thread or a Zoom meeting? And how much manual work is involved before the information shared in that communication channel is appropriately shared in NetSuite? By integrating your chat and meeting tools with NetSuite, you can eliminate hours of manual data entry while making sure everyone has the context they need to do their best work.
Examples of these tools:
- Slack
- Zoom
- Microsoft Teams
Customer relationship management (CRM) software
CRM platforms are often an organization’s central database for all their customer data. Conversations with sales, customer interactions, support tickets, and more. Despite everything NetSuite can do, CRM tools are still in use by most organizations. That means there’s a disconnect between NetSuite data and anything involving your customers. By integrating these tools, everyone at your organization will have all that rich customer data at their fingertips, enriching everything they’re working on.
Examples of these tools:
- HubSpot
- Salesforce
- Pipedrive
Spreadsheets
Despite how powerful NetSuite’s tools are, you’ll always have some data buried in a spreadsheet somewhere. With no integration solution, you’ll be stuck importing spreadsheets and spending hours cleaning up that data or jumping back and forth between NetSuite and your spreadsheet. That’s why having an integration platform that supports spreadsheets is absolutely essential.
Examples of these tools include:
- Google Sheets
- Microsoft Excel
Whiteboarding tools
Sometimes, you just need a whiteboard and a few post-its to turn an idea into a full-fledged campaign. These collaborative spaces are a fantastic place for brainstorming, but create hurdles for the rest of your workflow. After all, someone has to manually copy and paste the outcome of these sessions into NetSuite if you’re going to do anything with it. That’s why an integration is essential if you use these whiteboards at all.
Examples of these tools include:
- Miro
- Microsoft Whiteboard
- Nuclino
Project management tools
While NetSuite has some strong project management capabilities, there might be teams in your organization that use dedicated PM tools, creating data silos that impact other workflows. Software developers, for example, often rely on Jira to track their development work. Marketers, HR teams, and other business teams might use Asana or Trello to track projects, creating their own silos.
By integrating all your project management systems, you can ensure everyone has the data they need to push their project to the finish line.
Examples of these tools include:
- Jira
- Asana
- Trello
How to integrate NetSuite with your tech stack
While there are multiple options for integrating NetSuite with your other tools on the market, only one stands above the rest.
Unito.
Unito is a two-way integration solution with some of the deepest integrations on the market for tools like NetSuite, Jira, Slack, Smartsheet, ServiceNow, and Salesforce. It’s the only tool that allows teams to deploy integrations in days without relying on IT or expensive third-party consultants while keeping the customization and robust integration capability of enterprise-grade solutions.