In the complex world of enterprise financial management, having access to real-time, consolidated financial data across multiple subsidiaries is not just a convenience—it's a competitive necessity. For financial professionals managing multi-entity organizations, the limitations of traditional ERP systems like NetSuite often create significant operational bottlenecks.

This article explores how DataGOL's innovative platform transformed financial reporting for a client struggling with NetSuite's native reporting capabilities, delivering a customized solution (a financial data product) that would not have been possible to achieve easily on other platforms.

The Challenge: Beyond NetSuite's Native Capabilities

Our client, a growing enterprise with multiple subsidiaries, faced significant challenges with their financial reporting processes:

• Their finance team could only view consolidated balance sheets for a single month at a time, making trend analysis virtually impossible without manual intervention.

• Creating department-specific budget reports with vendor-level details required extensive manual work across eight different departments.

• Generating a consolidated balance sheet across subsidiaries with monthly breakdowns—a view not available in NetSuite's native reporting—involved exporting data to Excel and manually combining reports, with hours of manual labor wasted.

As one finance team member described, "We're spending more time compiling reports than actually analyzing them." By the time reports were ready, the data was often outdated for timely decision-making.

The DataGOL Approach: Seamless Integration and AI Enabled Modeling

DataGOL approached the challenge by first understanding the client's specific reporting needs and data structure. Our implementation began with utilizing DataGOL’s state-of-the-art connectors to achieve connections via NetSuite's SuiteQL tool and JDBC provider, allowing direct access to NetSuite's underlying datastore—a strategic approach that successfully bypassed the constraints of their SuiteTalk REST Web API.

The real magic happened in DataGOL's modeling layer. Our platform enabled the creation of sophisticated data models that connected account names, account types, and financial transactions with their corresponding journal entries. This AI-assisted modeling capability—unique to DataGOL—allowed us to track exactly how much credit and debit activity occurred in each individual account, creating the foundation for truly comprehensive financial reporting.

The Solution: Real-Time Financial Dashboards

The culmination of DataGOL's work was a set of interactive financial dashboards that delivered precisely what the client needed:

Consolidated Balance Sheet with Monthly Trends

The centerpiece was a consolidated balance sheet dashboard that displayed financial data across all subsidiaries with monthly breakdowns. This dashboard provided immediate visibility into:

• Asset values across multiple months (January through June 2024)

• Detailed breakdowns of accounts receivable, including allowances for doubtful accounts

• Current assets categorized by bank account with precise values for each month

• Consistent month-to-month comparisons that revealed financial trends at a glance

The dashboard's design allowed financial professionals to quickly drill down into specific accounts while maintaining the broader context of the organization's financial position.

Department Budget Reporting with Vendor Details

The second critical component addressed the client's need for department-specific budget reporting. DataGOL's solution automated what had previously been an entirely manual process, creating department-specific reports that compared actual spending against budgeted amounts with vendor-level detail.

This automation eliminated the need for finance team members to manually create eight different departmental reports each month, saving approximately 24 hours of work monthly and delivering insights weeks earlier than the previous process allowed.

The Technical Advantage: Why Only DataGOL Could Deliver

The combination of flexible data integration, AI-enabled modeling capabilities, and agentic visualization tools made DataGOL's solution uniquely powerful.

Robust Connectors 

DataGOL has several ways to connect with Netsuite - using JDBC or REST or using Netsuite reporting api’s. All of them have unique idiosyncrasies. It is important to understand which connector works in the client environment and setting the permissions accordingly. 

Advanced Data Pipeline Architecture

DataGOL's platform created a specialized data pipeline that retrieved and processed data from four critical entities: financial accounts, transactions, transaction lines, and journal entries. This comprehensive data access ensured that every financial movement was captured and properly categorized.

AI-Powered Sophisticated Data Modeling

DataGOL's AI-powered modeling layer transforms raw financial data into meaningful business insights by connecting account information with transactions, tracking journal entries, calculating precise credit and debit amounts, and creating a flattened semantic view that can be easily visualized in the BI layer. The integrated AI assistant understands the relationship between entities based on metadata and generates the underlying queries, making model creation easy and seamless.

Automated Scheduling and Real-Time Updates

Unlike manual export processes that quickly become outdated, DataGOL's solution included scheduled data retrieval that ensured dashboards always displayed the most current financial information, enabling truly data-driven decision making.

The Impact: From Manual Compilation to Strategic Analysis

The transformation from NetSuite's limited reporting capabilities to DataGOL's comprehensive financial dashboards had immediate and significant impacts:

• Finance team members reclaimed approximately 30 hours per month previously spent on manual report compilation

• Decision-makers gained access to financial insights weeks earlier than under the previous system

• The organization developed a single source of financial truth, eliminating discrepancies between different reports

• Financial professionals shifted from data compilation to strategic analysis, adding greater value to the organization

As one finance team member noted, "What used to take us days now happens automatically. We're finally able to focus on what the numbers mean rather than just gathering them."

Conclusion: Beyond Standard Reporting

This case study demonstrates how DataGOL's platform transcends the limitations of standard ERP reporting to deliver truly customized financial insights. By combining flexible data integration, sophisticated modeling, and intuitive agentic visualization, DataGOL created a solution that would have been impossible to achieve on any other platform standalone.

For financial professionals managing complex organizations with multiple subsidiaries, the message is clear: You don't have to accept the limitations of your ERP system's native reporting capabilities. With DataGOL’s, AI-enabled, truly customized, real-time financial reporting isn't just possible—it's surprisingly easy to achieve.