NetSuite has rolled out a new solution that helps manage businesses that are both product- and service-based, which Evan Goldberg, founder and executive vice president, calls “Anything as a Service” companies.
“Gone are the days when businesses fell entirely into clean segments such as manufacturing or internet services. Modern businesses develop, distribute, and get paid for their offerings in diverse ways that make these artificial categories obsolete,” said Goldberg during his keynote presentation. “With this new SuiteSuccess edition, organizations can consolidate and streamline business processes and automate revenue recognition across their product and service offerings to improve efficiency, expand insights, and enhance the customer experience.”
Evan Goldberg, NetSuite co-founder, executive vice president
NetSuite’s XaaS solution (the ‘X’ means a variable that can stand in for anything) is meant to help businesses with diverse offerings. It helps both product and service businesses standardize and streamline their processes across different revenue streams through automated transaction reporting, AP/AR, and close.
It also has inventory management capacities that help businesses optimize stock levels, simplify inventory transfers, and reduce stockouts by providing real-time inventory visibility across all channels including warehouses, retail stores, drop shippers, 3PLs, trunk stocks, and more. It also manages recurring revenue by automating revenue scheduling, allocation and reporting.
The solution also sports project management capacities that can take key metrics from similar past projects and calculate the risk that project will be behind schedule or overbudget, as well as recommend [people] that are the best fit for the project based on skills and availability. NetSuite itself uses the solution for this purpose.
“Now our NetSuite customer success organization uses SuiteProjects Pro to schedule thousands of consultants doing 15,000 projects a year and our managers are getting better visibility into hiring, skillsets and availability,” he said.
In a later interview, he said the inspiration for the product came from looking at NetSuite’s own customers and observing that many product-centered businesses are now offering services and many service-centered businesses are now offering products. It was easy to see that, rather than make customers jump from one product to the other, it was better to build a comprehensive solution.
This involves more than just welding together its product and service solutions into a single package. Goldberg said development needed more of a coordinated approach to make sure the different components communicated and worked together. This way, for example, people can see the different elements working together as they observe things like how much they spend in each area and how those expenses relate to each other.
“I think it’s unique that NetSuite has such a sophisticated manufacturing capability, project management capability, and subscription management capability all in one system. That itself is unusual, a lot of the time these elements exist in different systems. But it’s more than just having them all. We have to make sure they all tie together, that each component of the system is cognizant of the other components in the system. That is how you get the real benefit of the suite, when the pieces talk to each other. So it’s a combination of having that functionality, but also having it be truly pre-integrated,” he said in an interview.
New connector, enhanced products
Goldberg also announced that, by popular demand, they have released a way to connect its software with Microsoft Outlook. The connector automatically syncs with Outlook through a real-time data flow between Outlook Mail, Calendar and NetSuite, which can reduce the need for manual data entry. “[It will] eliminate those data silos, speed up processes and improve the experience and productivity of all users,” he said during his keynote address.
He also announced several product enhancements.
NetSuite SuiteProcurement has now been embedded into NetSuite Advanced Procurement, which allows buyers to directly access supplier catalogs, select items, and instantly generate purchase orders in NetSuite, helping to reduce manual entry and decrease the likelihood of delays.
NetSuite SuiteBilling, used to tailor subscription management processes to the needs of a business, now enables users to invoice and allocate revenue for associated services, projects, and hardware prior to activating the subscription service. They can also configure the bill date of the service automatically using a preference or manually on the subscription line.
Finally, NetSuite also announced it is now integrated with the Digital Business Network Alliance, a nonprofit backed by the Federal Reserve that serves as the legal entity overseeing the US open Exchange Framework, which, in March 2024, announced the first successful electronic invoice transmission over the U.S. network. The integration means that NetSuite has become one of the first ERP systems to comply with the organization’s standards for e-invoicing, meaning that users can use the network to facilitate orders, invoices, payments, and communications between buyers and sellers electronically. While E-invoicing isn’t yet mandatory in the US, businesses are looking at how they can ensure compliance when the time comes. Goldberg, during his presentation, also said it will dramatically lower invoicing costs for businesses.
The International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board is proposing to tailor some of its standards to align with recent additions to the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants’ International Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants when it comes to using the work of an external expert.
The IAASB is asking for comments via a digital response template that can be found on the IAASB website by July 24, 2025.
In December 2023, the IESBA approved an exposure draft for proposed revisions to the IESBA’s Code of Ethics related to using the work of an external expert. The proposals included three new sections to the Code of Ethics, including provisions for professional accountants in public practice; professional accountants in business and sustainability assurance practitioners. The IESBA approved the provisions on using the work of an external expert at its December 2024 meeting, establishing an ethical framework to guide accountants and sustainability assurance practitioners in evaluating whether an external expert has the necessary competence, capabilities and objectivity to use their work, as well as provisions on applying the Ethics Code’s conceptual framework when using the work of an outside expert.
President Donald Trump’s tariffs would effectively cause a tax increase for low-income families that is more than three times higher than what wealthier Americans would pay, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
The report from the progressive think tank outlined the outcomes for Americans of all backgrounds if the tariffs currently in effect remain in place next year. Those making $28,600 or less would have to spend 6.2% more of their income due to higher prices, while the richest Americans with income of at least $914,900 are expected to spend 1.7% more. Middle-income families making between $55,100 and $94,100 would pay 5% more of their earnings.
Trump has imposed the steepest U.S. duties in more than a century, including a 145% tariff on many products from China, a 25% rate on most imports from Canada and Mexico, duties on some sectors such as steel and aluminum and a baseline 10% tariff on the rest of the country’s trading partners. He suspended higher, customized tariffs on most countries for 90 days.
Economists have warned that costs from tariff increases would ultimately be passed on to U.S. consumers. And while prices will rise for everyone, lower-income families are expected to lose a larger portion of their budgets because they tend to spend more of their earnings on goods, including food and other necessities, compared to wealthier individuals.
Food prices could rise by 2.6% in the short run due to tariffs, according to an estimate from the Yale Budget Lab. Among all goods impacted, consumers are expected to face the steepest price hikes for clothing at 64%, the report showed.
The Yale Budget Lab projected that the tariffs would result in a loss of $4,700 a year on average for American households.
Artificial intelligence is just getting started in the accounting world, but it is already helping firms like technology specialist Schellman do more things with fewer people, allowing the firm to scale back hiring and reduce headcount in certain areas through natural attrition.
Schellman CEO Avani Desai said there have definitely been some shifts in headcount at the Top 100 Firm, though she stressed it was nothing dramatic, as it mostly reflects natural attrition combined with being more selective with hiring. She said the firm has already made an internal decision to not reduce headcount in force, as that just indicates they didn’t hire properly the first time.
“It hasn’t been about reducing roles but evolving how we do work, so there wasn’t one specific date where we ‘started’ the reduction. It’s been more case by case. We’ve held back on refilling certain roles when we saw opportunities to streamline, especially with the use of new technologies like AI,” she said.
One area where the firm has found such opportunities has been in the testing of certain cybersecurity controls, particularly within the SOC framework. The firm examined all the controls it tests on the service side and asked which ones require human judgment or deep expertise. The answer was a lot of them. But for the ones that don’t, AI algorithms have been able to significantly lighten the load.
“[If] we don’t refill a role, it’s because the need actually has changed, or the process has improved so significantly [that] the workload is lighter or shared across the smarter system. So that’s what’s happening,” said Desai.
Outside of client services like SOC control testing and reporting, the firm has found efficiencies in administrative functions as well as certain internal operational processes. On the latter point, Desai noted that Schellman’s engineers, including the chief information officer, have been using AI to help develop code, which means they’re not relying as much on outside expertise on the internal service delivery side of things. There are still people in the development process, but their roles are changing: They’re writing less code, and doing more reviewing of code before it gets pushed into production, saving time and creating efficiencies.
“The best way for me to say this is, to us, this has been intentional. We paused hiring in a few areas where we saw overlaps, where technology was really working,” said Desai.
However, even in an age awash with AI, Schellman acknowledges there are certain jobs that need a human, at least for now. For example, the firm does assessments for the FedRAMP program, which is needed for cloud service providers to contract with certain government agencies. These assessments, even in the most stable of times, can be long and complex engagements, to say nothing of the less predictable nature of the current government. As such, it does not make as much sense to reduce human staff in this area.
“The way it is right now for us to do FedRAMP engagements, it’s a very manual process. There’s a lot of back and forth between us and a third party, the government, and we don’t see a lot of overall application or technology help… We’re in the federal space and you can imagine, [with] what’s going on right now, there’s a big changing market condition for clients and their pricing pressure,” said Desai.
As Schellman reduces staff levels in some places, it is increasing them in others. Desai said the firm is actively hiring in certain areas. In particular, it’s adding staff in technical cybersecurity (e.g., penetration testers), the aforementioned FedRAMP engagements, AI assessment (in line with recently becoming an ISO 42001 certification body) and in some client-facing roles like marketing and sales.
“So, to me, this isn’t about doing more with less … It’s about doing more of the right things with the right people,” said Desai.
While these moves have resulted in savings, she said that was never really the point, so whatever the firm has saved from staffing efficiencies it has reinvested in its tech stack to build its service line further. When asked for an example, she said the firm would like to focus more on penetration testing by building a SaaS tool for it. While Schellman has a proof of concept developed, she noted it would take a lot of money and time to deploy a full solution — both of which the firm now has more of because of its efficiency moves.
“What is the ‘why’ behind these decisions? The ‘why’ for us isn’t what I think you traditionally see, which is ‘We need to get profitability high. We need to have less people do more things.’ That’s not what it is like,” said Desai. “I want to be able to focus on quality. And the only way I think I can focus on quality is if my people are not focusing on things that don’t matter … I feel like I’m in a much better place because the smart people that I’ve hired are working on the riskiest and most complicated things.”