Published on July 20, 2020.

There are a number of interesting new features coming in NetSuite 2020 Release 2 - features that will continue to improve upon NetSuite's financial and operational functions, human resources / employee engagement functions, supply chain functions, and more. Here are a few of the features that I'm looking forward to the most.

Consolidated Invoicing

NetSuite refers to this as "invoice grouping," but I've always referred to it as "consolidated invoicing." The general idea is that instead of sending a number of individual invoices to a customer, you send them a single consolidated invoice. This is often a contract requirement for larger customers, who prefer to receive a single invoice at the end of a certain billing period (usually at the end of each month).

Preparing consolidated invoices in NetSuite has traditionally been a tedious, manual process. However, with this new feature, the process will be automated and streamlined. A single "invoice group" will be created, and while it won't be a real NetSuite transaction (it will not have GL impact), it sounds like it will very much behave like one. When a payment for an invoice group is received, the payment can be applied to the individual invoices that made up the invoice group.

Additional SuiteQL Built-In Functions

I wrote last week about NetSuite's support for built-in functions in SuiteQL, and gave an example of how you can use the "DF" function to easily get access to the display value for things like transaction statuses. At the moment, there are only a few other built-in functions.

NetSuite 2020 Release 2 will add support for several new built-in functions, including BUILTIN.HIERARCHY (which will return the hierarchical path of a value), BUILTIN.NAMED_GROUP (which will return filter options for things like department, class, location, etc), BUILTIN.PERIOD, and BUILTIN.RELATIVE_RANGES (which will return calendar ranges for date fields - such as Last Fiscal Year, Current Week, etc).

Enhancements to the Login Audit Trail

Starting with 2020 Release 2, the Login Audit Trail will include information on cases when a user has either logged out, or switched roles. However, it will not log cases when a user's session has timed out.

Required Deposit Workflow

This new feature gives us much more control over customer deposits. For example, you'll be able to specify a deposit amount based on values at the lineitem level, at the header level, or based on a percentage of the entire order.

New SuiteScript Modules

NetSuite 2020 Release 2 will include two new SuiteScript modules: A compress module ("N/compress") and a record context module ("N/recordContext"). As you'd expect, the compress module can be used to compress and decompress one or more files to and from an .TAR or .ZIP archive. The record context module will give developers a way to programmatically determine the country (localization) that a script is running in.

Enhancements to Column Properties in the Record and Current Record Modules

Some helpful new properties will be available to use in the record ("N/record") and current record ("N/currentRecord") modules. They include isDisabled, isDisplay, isMandatory, and isSortable. These will be very helpful in cases where you're programmatically generating UIs based off of NetSuite standard or custom records.

Records Catalog

Of all of the new features coming in NetSuite 2020 Release 2, the Records Catalog sounds like it might be the most helpful to me. In many ways, the Records Catalog is similar to the SuiteScript Records Browser, in that it provides information on record metadata. However, unlike the Records Browser, the Records Catalog will provide information based specifically on the account that you're in. So you'll have access to information on custom records, forms, and fields - and you will not see information that doesn't apply to your account when features aren't enabled.

Wrapping Up

In this post, I've only scratched the surface on the new features coming in NetSuite 2020 Release 2. But there's a lot more to it. For more information, check out this NetSuite blog post and this page.

One of the things that I love about NetSuite is its practice of continuous improvement, and especially how the releases improve the platform in so many ways and at so many different levels. As a result, each release has something for everyone, and NetSuite 2020 Release 2 will be no exception.

According to SuiteAnswers, we'll be able to opt-in to the 2020.2 Release Preview starting tomorrow (July 21, 2020).