MineSweep

MineSweep – Venture to Confidence

MineSweep is an extendable tool that is built native in NetSuite to identify potential data and process issues in NetSuite with functionality to manage these exceptions.  Apart from the growing list of more than 100 plus probes users can build their own probes from simple searches and powerful SuiteQL statements.

Key Benefits

Users, especially those in charge of different business process areas, may chance upon transactions and records that are outside the norm. These outliers may have a genuine explanation or maybe due to an incorrect data entry, process issue or a potential fraud. Many a times such outliers (in our parlance, Mines) show their true nature when it manifests itself into an issue that could cause considerable financial loss, decrease inefficiency or reduce confidence for the decision makers. Many of these mines are common across businesses, but there are few that are unique for your organization.  MineSweep leverages the power of NetSuite’s native searches and SuiteQL to identify these mines and is an intuitive tool so you can easily manage them.

Customer Quote

It gives us a head start on identifying an issue and fixing it

Example

The team closes the period, all management reports have been sent, and then you realize that there are unapproved transactions in the closed period. This will reduce the confidence of the accounting team and require time to correct – how convenient it will be if the user who is in-charge of closing the period can go into a dashboard and make sure such transactions are not there before closing.

Probes

Probes are searches on steroids. Whereas a search easily identifies potential issues, a probe encapsulates this finding and provides enhanced management abilities - be it marking the priority on the probe or identifying a focus area or giving access to multiple users to see potential issues or excluding certain exceptions.

Assign probe or individual exceptions

The ability to task a user and make sure the user knows exactly what to look for is vital.This feature allows any user to assign the entire probe or a single record to an individual for their feedback or action. For example, if you are seeing customers managed by a specific collection agent has several overdue balances, you could call the transaction to the specific collection agents attention, right from the probe. Probe or individual exceptions can be tagged to external systems if needed for auditing purposes.

Exception management

Exceptions to a rule have lived longer than cockroaches. This feature allows you to mark certain records as exceptions so that the records do not show up in the future. Doing this reduces the probe results and allows you to focus only on records that needs attention. For example, when you see journals created and approved by the same person, you can review them and once you are comfortable about the validity you could mark that journal as an exception and give your justification. Or when you review vendor bills created without purchase orders and if you know your utility bills do not have a POs you can exclude that vendor so that any future bills from that vendor will not be included in this probe.

Snapshot

Snapshot enables the user to create a PDF file of the current probe results, comments and exceptions. This allows auditability of the process with a system generated timestamped PDF. For example, if there is an ongoing review of users and their access or say GL accounts created or modified in a period, the reviewer can enter feedback and capture that as a snapshot so that the information can be provided as audit evidence to the auditors.