Blowing Up the "Big Bang": A Better Approach to NetSuite Implementation

You've got your licenses. You've sat through a dozen design workshops. The migration's complete, and you're live in NetSuite.

Congratulations, you've made it halfway.

That's the hard truth most teams don't hear until it's too late: go-live isn't the finish line. It's just the handoff. The optimization of your financial platform doesn't stop when you go live: it's an ongoing journey that requires the same intentional planning you put into the original implementation.

Enter Angela Ngo and Ellen Heister, leaders at Uniqus Consultech who've guided dozens of mid-market teams through this critical transition. With years of experience both fixing broken NetSuite environments and orchestrating successful implementations, their advice centers on a fundamental shift in mindset: rethink how you frame the project from day one.

“Most companies plan and budget for implementation but overlook the post go-live evolution. They invest in the build - but ignore the upkeep."

‍‍– Ellen Heister, Managing Director of Technology Consulting at Uniqus

Based on conversations with Heister and Ngo, Uniqus’ Managing Director of Business Development, this article looks at best practices for evaluating implementation partners and foundational habits that will help you power your ERP for the months & years to come.

#1 – Bad Partners → Bad NetSuite Experiences 

Not all implementation partners are built the same, and the differences run much deeper than pricing or timeline promises.

Some will drop in a template chart of accounts and walk away after go-live. Others will ask the hard questions that most teams haven't considered: 

• Why are you really moving to NetSuite? 
• What specific growth trajectory are you planning for? 
• How does your current chart of accounts actually limit your visibility into departmental spend or entity performance? 
• What triggering events on your roadmap — like an IPO, acquisition, or international expansion — will change your reporting requirements?
  ‍

The challenge is that these differences aren't always obvious during the sales process. You need to assess partner fit across three critical dimensions that will determine whether your NetSuite implementation scales with your business or becomes a source of ongoing frustration.

Do they understand accounting, not just NetSuite?

It seems obvious, but the truth is that NetSuite expertise =! accounting acumen. Without  accounting chops, setting up foundational elements in NetSuite like your chart of accounts can go awry. Heister explains, 

"Your chart of accounts and your financial segmentations are like the spine or the skeleton of your ERP. If they're not coordinated and in place, the whole thing is just going to end up being a mess."

This isn't just about technical configuration — it's about understanding how your financial data architecture needs to support both current operations and future growth. Heister sees this constantly: "There's a lot of issues that can come up when people are just rolling forward their charts of accounts into NetSuite, and not really taking advantage of what the system offers in terms of flexible dimensions and segmentations.”

Look for partners who can design your financial architecture from a combination of accounting principles and best practices first, not just configure fields based on what you had before. The former approach often leads to the same reporting limitations you had in your legacy system, just in a more expensive platform.

Test: Ask your implementation partner how they’d approach redesigning your COA. 

• Do they start by understanding your current reporting pain points? 
• Do they ask about your departmental structure, entity setup, and plans for expansion?
• Can they explain the trade-offs between different segmentation approaches and how those decisions will impact your reporting six months from now? 
  ‍

Partners who jump straight into technical configuration without understanding your business context are showing you exactly how they'll approach the entire project.

Are you working with process designers or just system configurers?

There are implementation partners out there who have pre-formatted IP and will load their template, configure it to your basic specs, and call it a day. If your company has straightforward needs and strong internal accounting expertise, great. But then there are also partners who do deep process advisory work — the kind that helps you rethink your entire record-to-report cycle and design segments that will scale as you add new entities or business lines.

The distinction matters: “Most companies moving to NetSuite are doing so precisely because they've outgrown their current system,” Heister notes. 

If you just replicate your existing processes in NetSuite without strategic redesign, you're likely to hit the same scaling limitations within 12-18 months. You want partners who will challenge your assumptions about how things "have to" work and help you leverage NetSuite's capabilities to eliminate manual processes.

Test: See how partners think about strategically mapping your processes to NetSuite.

Instead of just migrating your existing three-way match process, a good partner will walk through your entire procure-to-pay cycle to identify bottlenecks and design approval workflows that scale with your org structure. Instead of replicating your current close checklist, they'll help you build reporting and reconciliation processes that reduce your close timeline while improving accuracy. This level of advisory work requires deep accounting expertise, not just NetSuite technical skills.

Be honest with yourself about how much help you need during implementation and where you are from a business maturity perspective. If you're moving from QuickBooks and have never had formal financial processes, you need much more design work than a company transitioning from a mid-market ERP with established procedures.

Is the proposed support level realistic for your team's bandwidth?

This is where many implementations go sideways, and it's often due to misaligned expectations around who does what work.

"A lot of teams try to save money by owning too much of the implementation — data migration, chart design, etc. They underestimate what they're signing up for."
Ellen Heister

The reality is that ERP implementations are incredibly resource-intensive for your finance team, especially during the final 8-10 weeks before go-live. Your people still need to close the books monthly, manage cash flow, handle vendor payments, and execute all their normal responsibilities while simultaneously testing system configurations, validating data migrations, and preparing for cutover. Many teams underestimate this dual workload and find themselves stretched beyond capacity right when attention to detail matters most.

Test: Run through your statement of work with a fine-toothed comb. And then, do it again.

If the details are sparse about who's responsible for what specific deliverables, that's a red flag. You should have a clear understanding of whether you're getting help with data cleansing and migration, user acceptance testing coordination, training development, and post-go-live support. Some partners will quote a lower price by assuming your team will handle data migration internally, then leave you scrambling when you realize how complex that process actually is.

Ngo adds another crucial dimension that many teams miss: make sure your partner knows what's already included in your NetSuite license.

"There are features you may already own that can save time — but only if your partner actually knows to turn them on."
Angela Ngo

This happens more often than you'd expect. Teams will spend months building workarounds for functionality that's already available in their licensing tier, simply because their implementation partner didn't do a thorough audit of what they had access to. A good partner will start every engagement by reviewing your exact NetSuite license configuration and identifying opportunities to leverage existing modules before recommending additional purchases or customizations.

#2 – Intentional and Iterative > A Big Bang Approach

The temptation to implement every available module at once is understandable but dangerous.

For companies with adequate resources, robust processes, and clear leadership buy-in, going live with everything at once might be perfectly suitable. The same is true for businesses who have purchased a relatively standard set of modules. 

But for companies who don’t fall into these two camps? Trying to go live with your entire NetSuite contract on day one will be a guaranteed headache. It leads to rushed configuration decisions, incomplete testing cycles, and teams that are overwhelmed trying to learn multiple new systems simultaneously. 

The inevitable result is partial rollouts where teams revert to Excel for processes they thought NetSuite would handle, defeating the purpose of the implementation.

Instead, you want to stage your implementation in a way that allows your team to build confidence and competency with each phase before adding complexity. This approach takes longer upfront but results in much higher long-term adoption and fewer remediation projects down the road. Heister adds,

"You'll learn more in your first quarter using NetSuite than during the entire design phase. So let that learning happen before you lock in every module."

This learning is more profound than most teams expect. You'll discover that certain workflows you thought were critical actually slow down your process. You'll find that reports you spent weeks configuring during implementation don't give you the insights you need for decision-making. You'll realize that some automation you were excited about doesn't account for the edge cases that happen in 20% of your transactions.

Solution: Stage your implementation to be incremental and to improve iteratively.

Here's a general staging approach that works for teams: 

1. Get your chart of accounts structure and segmentation right: remember, your COA in Quickbooks/Xero/etc. won’t naturally transfer to NetSuite (see chapter #2)
2. Start with core financials: work with your implementation partner to map key processes in NetSuite like R2R, P2P, and O2C. 
3. Test run your close process: see which modules will help you to complete reconciliations and adjacent close tasks.
4. Review your reporting setup: since NetSuite reporting isn’t the most intuitive, make sure that your team is able to find and load necessary reports 
5. Let your team live in this configuration for a full quarter, including at least one complete close cycle: then, implement the next wave of functionality based on what you've learned about how your team actually uses the system versus how you thought they would during the design phase.

The learnings from this discovery period will drive your next phase of implementation. If you're not using the ARM module you implemented, figure out why — is it a training issue, a configuration problem, or genuinely not the right fit for your business? If you find yourself doing manual journal entries for recurring transactions, that's a signal to review what automation capabilities you actually are using in your next phase.

This iterative approach also helps you avoid the trap of over-customization that plagues many implementations. When you're trying to implement everything at once, it's tempting to say "yes" to every workflow script and custom field request just to keep the project moving. But each customization creates long-term maintenance overhead and makes future NetSuite updates more complex.

#3 – Plan for the System You'll Need in Six Months

Here's the fundamental mindset shift that separates successful NetSuite implementations from ones that require expensive remediation: NetSuite is a platform, not a destination.

You don't implement it to finish something — you implement it to enable growth and continuous optimization of your financial operations. The companies that get the most value from NetSuite are the ones who plan for this evolution from day one, rather than treating go-live as the end of their ERP project.

Heister frames it best:

“People tend to focus so much on the actual implementation that they don’t step back to think about what’s next after going live. The system you go live with won’t be the same a year later, maybe even six months later.” 

Solution: Build a governance framework that treats NetSuite optimization as an ongoing process

Doing so requires three key components that most implementations overlook:

Assign NetSuite ownership post-go-live

Someone on your team needs to own the strategic evolution of your NetSuite environment, and it can't be the CFO or Controller who's already stretched thin with financial operations. This person becomes your internal NetSuite product manager — they understand both the business requirements and the system capabilities well enough to make strategic decisions about configuration changes, module additions, and integration priorities.

In practice, this often works best as a joint role between finance and IT. You need someone who understands accounting processes well enough to evaluate whether a proposed change will improve or complicate your close cycle, but also has enough technical background to understand the implications of customizations and integrations.

Define KPIs to track success

Most implementations focus exclusively on go-live milestones without establishing metrics for long-term success. You need leading indicators that will tell you when your NetSuite environment is drifting out of alignment with business needs, before it becomes a crisis that requires emergency remediation.

Classically valuable metrics include:

• Time to close
• Reporting lag (how long between close and management reporting)
• System adoption rates by module 
  ‍

These all become your early warning system. If your close cycle starts getting longer despite having NetSuite, that's a signal that your processes aren't scaling with transaction volume. 

Set a cadence for internal reviews

The most successful NetSuite implementations establish regular touchpoints for assessing system performance and planning improvements. This isn't just IT maintenance — its strategic business process optimization through the lens of NetSuite.

Both Heister and Ngo recommend establishing a quarterly business debrief as an internal finance team to assess pain points in execution and operation. These sessions should focus on identifying friction in your day-to-day processes, evaluating whether current NetSuite configurations are meeting business needs, and prioritizing potential improvements for the next quarter.

Ngo likens this approach to doing a “health check”. Every quarter after go-live, you should be asking yourself these three diagnostic questions: 

• What NetSuite functionality are you actually using day-to-day? 
• What modules aren't you using despite paying for them in your license?
• Where are Excel workarounds creeping back into your processes despite having NetSuite capabilities that should handle those tasks?
  ‍

And as for other valuable questions? Heister recommends these:

• Which processes are taking longer than expected, and why? 
• What reporting gaps are slowing down decision-making? 
• Are there new business requirements (new entities, products, or geographies) that will require system changes? 
• What's working well that we should replicate in other areas?
  ‍

The best implementation partners understand this ongoing optimization cycle and design their initial implementations to support it. They don't just set up your system for current requirements — they build in flexibility and scalability for the changes they know are coming.

#4 – Document Like Your Future Self Depends on It

The documentation gap is one of the most common and expensive failures in NetSuite implementations.

"Fifty percent of my work is fixing NetSuite environments that were implemented without documentation. When I ask for the original process maps or config docs, they don't exist."
Ellen Heister

This isn't just about having records for compliance purposes — it's about preserving the institutional knowledge that makes your NetSuite environment function effectively. 

Say the person who led your implementation leaves the company. Or you need to onboard new team members to your team instance, or you’re trying to troubleshoot an issue that cropped up months after go-live. In all cases, comprehensive documentation becomes the difference between quick resolution and expensive consulting engagements.

While teams aren’t responsible for creating this documentation themselves, they should be proactive in making sure their implementation partner provides the requisite documentation. 

Here's what should be non-negotiable deliverables from your implementation partner:

Core Documentation

Business requirements document (BRD)  

This becomes your blueprint for understanding why specific configuration decisions were made. It should capture not just what was built, but why those choices were made over alternatives, what business processes they support, and what assumptions about future growth they're based on. When you're evaluating changes to your NetSuite environment months or years later, the BRD helps you understand the downstream impacts of proposed modifications.

Process maps for core cycles 

Step-by-step documentation of your record-to-report, procure-to-pay, and order-to-cash processes as they're configured in NetSuite. These should include decision points, approval workflows, exception handling procedures, and integration touchpoints with other systems. The goal is that a new hire should be able to follow these process maps in combination with your SOPs and execute your financial operations without extensive training.

Data migration plan with validations and sign-offs 

Detailed record of how data moved from your legacy system to NetSuite, including mapping decisions, data cleansing rules, validation procedures, and formal sign-off processes. This documentation becomes critical if you ever need to research historical transactions or if auditors have questions about data integrity during the transition period.

Controls documentation 

Clear record of who owns what responsibilities in your NetSuite environment, how data flows between different modules, audit trail requirements, and segregation of duties. This should include both system-enforced controls (like approval workflows) and manual controls that rely on human oversight.

In addition to these suggestions, be sure to maintain a decision log that covers your configuration choices and also to involve your auditors before your implementation ends. In both cases, it’s better to invest the time documenting these processes during implementation when the details are fresh, rather than trying to recreate this information months later when auditors are asking detailed questions about data integrity and control effectiveness.

The Bottom Line

Your ERP is not a one-and-done project. The system you go live with won't be the one you need six months later — and that's by design.

"You're not buying a product. You're investing in a financial platform. That means choosing a partner who helps you manage it over time — not just get it stood up."
Angela Ngo

The teams that get the most value from NetSuite are the ones who plan for continuous optimization from day one. They choose partners who understand that implementation is just the beginning, not the end.

They document everything. They stage their rollout. They build governance into their process. And most importantly, they resist the temptation to treat go-live as a finish line.

Because in reality, it's just the starting line for what comes next.

Ellen Heister and Angela Ngo are leaders at Uniqus Consultech, a tech-enabled global platform that offers consulting solutions in the areas of technology, accounting & reporting, finance operations, governance, risk, and ESG.. For more insights on NetSuite implementations and financial transformations, connect with them on LinkedIn.