How to integrate with NetSuite successfully

Welcome to another edition of the Integration Insider—a weekly newsletter that provides the insights you need to build, maintain, and manage product integrations successfully.

In this week's edition, we're sharing tips for integrating with NetSuite successfully as well as impactful integrations you can implement.

Note: This article original appeared on our blog .

NetSuite, a leading ERP system for organizations of all shapes and sizes, typically collects and creates valuable financial data. In addition, it supports key financial processes, whether that’s related to accounts payable, accounts receivable, expense management, and more.

Given the platform’s value, you’ll likely need to integrate your internal instance of NetSuite with your other applications as well as connect customers’ instances with your product.

We’ll break down how you can integrate to NetSuite successfully—regardless of your use case—and highlight impactful examples to help you prioritize your integration efforts.

But to start, let’s align on the definition of a NetSuite API integration.

What is a NetSuite API integration?

It’s any API-based connection to NetSuite that lets you access and interact with data and functionality in the ERP system.

In addition, the integration falls into one of two?scenarios: building to an internal instance of NetSuite to automate a workflow(s) within your company, or building to a customer's instance(s) to automate a workflow(s) between your product and their version of the ERP system.

Best practices for integrating with NetSuite’s API

To help you integrate with NetSuite successfully, you can apply these best practices.

Review your integration options carefully?

NetSuite offers SOAP and REST APIs , along with suiteQL.

Each has pros and cons, and understanding them can help you suss out your best option:?

• NetSuite has offered SOAP for many years, so it’s highly reliable now. That said, because it’s SOAP, building to it can be highly complex and time consuming?

• Their REST API is fairly new, so it offers less functionality. However, given that it’s REST, it’s generally easier to build to

• SuiteQL lets you integrate with data in a RESTful manner, and it supports data that isn’t covered by either REST or SOAP. But it only lets you read data and there’s no publicly-available information on it, so using it can prove difficult?

Filter requests to avoid timeouts and only access the data you need

Whether it’s your internal or your customer’s instance of NetSuite, it’ll likely store a significant volume of accounting data.

This means that you'll likely need to apply specific filters within your requests to get responses quickly and avoid timeouts.?

For example, say you want to get vendor bills in NetSuite. You can filter by a specific accounting period to only fetch a certain batch of transactions.

Here’s how the request body for the request can look if you use suiteQL:

curl -X "POST" "https://***YOUR-NS-ACCOUNT-ID***.suitetalk.api.netsuite.com/services/rest/query/v1/suiteql/?limit=100&offset=0" \
     -H 'Authorization: OAuth oauth_consumer_key="***YOUR-CONSUMER-KEY***", oauth_nonce="***YOUR-NONCE***", oauth_signature="1bb31e23-4e97-40ba-8ef7-1ca20101fdfb", oauth_signature_method="HMAC-SHA1", oauth_timestamp="***YOUR-TIMESTAMP***", oauth_token="***YOUR-TOKEN***", oauth_version="1.0", realm=***YOUR-NS-ACCOUNT-ID***' \
     -H 'Prefer: transient' \
     -H 'Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8' \
     -H 'Cookie: NS_ROUTING_VERSION=LAGGING' \
     -d $'{
    "q": "SELECT * FROM transaction t WHERE t.postingperiod = '42' AND t.type = \”VendBill\””
}'        

Add a custom error message when you potentially hit a rate limit for the SOAP API

If you’re using NetSuite’s SOAP API, you might not get notified when you’ve hit their rate limit. Instead, you might get something like an “invalid login attempt” error message.

To help address this, you can add custom error wrapping (e.g., “Possible rate limit error”) during a period of high traffic, regardless of the error message you get back from NetSuite. You can also monitor your usage across endpoints and set alerts when you’re close to reaching your rate limit threshold for any given endpoint.

NetSuite API integration examples

Before you start building NetSuite integrations, it's worth understanding several impactful use cases.

Let’s review a few, starting with internal integrations.

Streamline purchase requisition approvals

As employees submit purchase requests in NetSuite, the approval process for any may involve multiple stakeholders (e.g., department lead, finance manager, etc.).

To make sure that every approver reviews and signs off (or rejects) a request quickly, you can integrate NetSuite with an application like Slack and build a flow where once a purchase request needs to be reviewed by a certain stakeholder, they would be notified via Slack. Within the Slack message, they can also learn about the request and access a link in NetSuite to review it further and approve/reject it.?

Add financial documents to folders in a file storage application

As your finance team works in NetSuite, they’re likely to create and manage important documents, such as purchase orders, vendor bills, expense reports, etc.

To help them store these documents in a secure place and access them with ease at a later point, you can integrate NetSuite with a file storage application like Box and build a flow where once a certain type of document gets created, it’s added to an associated folder in Box.

Create powerful, customizable financial dashboards

Say you offer a financial modeling platform that helps customers analyze and forecast their cash flow, expenses, cash balance, and more.

To ensure your users can access accurate, up-to-date information over time across their financial models, you can integrate with their instances of NetSuite and sync relevant data, like balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements on a consistent cadence (e.g., every 24 hours).

Empower customers to manage their vendor relationships?

Imagine you offer a platform that helps customers buy and manage vendors.

Let’s also assume that you need to help customers keep vendor data up to date in your platform so that they can effectively track upcoming renewals, analyze spend, reconcile transactions, and more.

To enable this, you can integrate with their instances of NetSuite and sync a wide range of transaction data from the ERP system every day, like transaction amounts, receipts, descriptions, dates, memos, and payment methods.

Integrate NetSuite and other accounting platforms with your product via Merge’s Unified API

Merge lets you integrate with more than a dozen accounting integrations—including NetSuite—through its Accounting Unified API .

In addition, Merge offers comprehensive, normalized Common Models—which span everything from balance sheets to invoices to journal entries to tracking categories. And the platform provides advanced features for syncing custom data, such as Remote Data and Field Mapping .

Finally, the platform offers integration observability features—which include fully-searchable logs, automated issue detection functionality, and holistic performance data—to help your customer-facing teams uncover, diagnose, and resolve integration issues quickly and easily.?

Learn more about using Merge to add accounting integrations to your product by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts .