Understanding the organization’s industry

Your first step in this process should be understanding the type of company you’re dealing with and their industry. All for-profit and not-for-profit companies have similar traits in that they all do some sort of internal accounting, they hire people to perform their day-to-day tasks, and they must report on their business activities to one or more levels of government. Knowing the industry they fit into can help you quickly learn a few additional things, including whether they provide products, services, or both to their target market, whether they are selling things Business-to-Business (B2B) or Business-to-Consumer (B2C), and so on. With that knowledge, you can then quickly assess which NetSuite features they are most likely going to need and which features you can skip over.

There are many lists of well-known industries online, but we typically use a shorter list when we’re categorizing NetSuite clients. We use...