The short version: Yes, you can ask NetSuite questions in plain English now, three ways: Oracle's own assistant, an AI client like ChatGPT or Claude connected through Oracle's connector, or a tool that runs inside NetSuite. The sentence is the easy part. What makes the answer right is everything the sentence leaves out: the as-of date, the subsidiary, the accounting book, the currency, the basis. Below are twenty questions controllers actually ask, most taken from forum threads where someone was trying to build the saved search, each with what it reads and the trap in it. Use them to test any plain-English tool against your own ledger, ours included.
In NetSuite forums, the same questions come up again and again. Does anyone know how to get a report that shows payments to vendors for each month? How do I show only unapplied customer payments? Why are items I applied still showing as open on the A/R aging? How do I get a trial balance as of the first day of the fiscal year? Is it actually possible to reconcile A/P aging to the trial balance?
Each one turns into a saved search, a formula and a back-and-forth about syntax. Asked in plain English, each is one sentence. The traps are why the first answer is often wrong.
What a good answer looks like
Before the list, here's the shape to expect from any tool. The number alone isn't enough. A good answer prints its assumptions and shows its working:
Open receivables more than 60 days past due, by customer As of 09/30/2026 · Consolidated (all subsidiaries) · USD · aged by due date [the table: customer, amount, number of invoices] Query: the SuiteQL (NetSuite's SQL-style query language) that produced it · Rows: the invoices behind each total
If an answer doesn't tell you the date, the scope and the basis, ask. If it can't show the query, don't put the number in front of anyone.
Collections and receivables
1. "Which customers have invoices more than 60 days past due, as of the end of last month?" Reads: open customer invoices and their due dates, as of a date. The trap: "as of" matters. Run it as of today and this month's collections have already changed last month's answer.
2. "Why does invoice 1043 show as 94 days old?" Reads: one invoice's date, terms, due date and the payments applied to it. The trap: days past due and days since invoice are different numbers. People spend whole threads reverse-engineering which one their aging report uses. Ask for both.
3. "Show me only the unapplied customer payments, and how much is unapplied on each." Reads: customer payments, and how much of each has been applied. The trap: in a saved search, the amount remaining field comes back empty on payments, so the obvious filter returns nothing. Practitioners work it out as the amount minus the amount applied. Customer deposits are a separate transaction type, so ask for both or you'll undercount cash received and not matched.
4. "Why are payments I applied still showing as open on the A/R aging?" Reads: the application records and their dates, plus the aging as of a date. The trap: an application dated after your as-of date doesn't count yet, and a customized aging report may carry a filter the standard one doesn't. Compare against the standard aging first.
Payables and spend
5. "What do we owe, by vendor and aging bucket, as of month-end?" Reads: open vendor bills as of a date. The trap: A/P aging reads bills, not accruals. Goods received and not yet billed aren't in it.
6. "What did we pay each vendor, month by month?" Reads: cash leaving your bank and card accounts, by vendor and month. The trap: payments aren't spend. This is cash out, which includes prepayments and bills from earlier months. Also check that bank accounts you've since closed are included. One asker's results came back incomplete until they added the old ones.
7. "Which vendors' spend grew fastest this year?" Reads: GL postings to expense and cost-of-goods accounts, by vendor, by month. The trap: this is the general ledger, so on a multi-book account it has to be held to one accounting book, or every posting counts once per book.
8. "Which purchase orders were received this month but not billed?" Reads: purchase orders, item receipts and bills, linked. The trap: this is your month-end accrual list. Partial receipts and partial bills make "not billed" a quantity question, not a yes/no.
Revenue and margin
9. "Monthly revenue per customer for the last twelve months — who dropped off?" Reads: GL postings to income accounts, by customer, by month. The trap: the sign. Revenue is a credit in the ledger. A good answer flips it positive for display and says so.
10. "Who were our top ten customers this year, and what share of revenue are they?" Reads: the same postings, ranked. The trap: subsidiary scope. Consolidated is usually what a concentration question means, but say so.
11. "Expense by project for the quarter, from the bill lines." Reads: transaction lines and the project on each one. The trap: header versus line fields. When a bill carries several projects, one per line, a report built on the header shows the bill total against the first project only. Ask for the line-level project.
12. "Where has revenue recognized run ahead of what we've billed?" Reads: revenue recognition and billing, by customer or contract. The trap: this is unbilled receivables, and it should tie to the unbilled-receivable account. When it doesn't, check first whether the period's revenue reclassification has run.
Close and controls
13. "Trial balance as of the first day of the fiscal year, for the auditors." Reads: every account's balance at a point in time. The trap: opening balances are last year's closing balances. A trial balance "for the first day" run by period gives you the first month. Ask for the balances as of the last day of the prior year, or run it by date.
14. "Why doesn't A/P aging agree with the A/P account on the trial balance?" Reads: the aging, the account balance, and the transactions that differ. The trap: usually not missing data. Aging runs by transaction date while the trial balance runs by period, so a bill dated August but posted to September lands differently on each. Also look for journal entries straight to A/P with no vendor, and the odd bill coded to the wrong control account.
15. "Which accounts moved more than 10% and $10,000 against last month?" Reads: two trial balances, compared. The trap: percentages on small balances. Without a dollar floor, the list fills with noise.
16. "Which journal entries dated last month were created after we started closing?" Reads: journal entries, with transaction date, posting period and created date. The trap: those are three different dates. Say which "after" you mean.
The questions from upstairs
17. "What was operating income by subsidiary last quarter, in US dollars?" Reads: income, cost of goods and expense for a period, per subsidiary. The trap: currency. Each subsidiary's own statement is in its base currency, so a Canadian subsidiary reports in CAD. Comparing it with the US one means translating at consolidated rates, the average rate for each month of the quarter.
18. "Show me the consolidated balance sheet as of quarter-end." Reads: per-account balances through a date, balance-sheet accounts only. The trap: the accounting book on a multi-book account, and the CTA (cumulative translation adjustment) line on a multi-currency one. CTA is a calculated balancing figure, not an error.
19. "Cash from operations by month this year." Reads: the monthly cash impact of postings, split operating, investing and financing. The trap: a direct cash flow is only as good as the account classification behind it. Check that it reconciles to the bank before you present the split.
20. "Which customers are paying slower this quarter than last?" Reads: invoice and payment dates by customer, for two quarters. The trap: averages. A small invoice paid very late can swamp the picture. Ask for days-to-pay weighted by amount, not just the plain average.
How to ask so the answer is right
Every trap above comes back to five things a good question states, or a good tool asks about:
- The date or period. "As of 09/30/2026" or "for the period ending September". They aren't the same filter.
- The subsidiary, or "consolidated".
- The accounting book, if you keep more than one.
- The currency: each subsidiary's own, or the reporting currency.
- The basis: due date or invoice date; GL totals or transaction lines.
The three ways to ask today
- Oracle's own assistant. Oracle has announced Ask Oracle for NetSuite 2026.2, a conversational assistant inside NetSuite. It arrives with that release, so when you get it depends on when your account is upgraded. Don't confuse it with NetSuite Expert, which answers questions about NetSuite's documentation, not your data.
- ChatGPT or Claude, connected. Available now. Oracle's AI Connector is free on Oracle's side, though you need a paid AI plan, and it lets an AI client query your account under a NetSuite role. What it can see depends almost entirely on that role. Claude + MCP + NetSuite shows how the connection works and where it breaks.
- A tool that runs inside NetSuite. That's what NSGPT is, described below.
Whichever you try, run these twenty against your own account and check three things. Did it show its working? Did it use the date, subsidiary and book you meant, or ask when you didn't say? Did it tell you when a figure came from a query it wrote on the fly rather than one that was tested in advance?
How NSGPT answers these
NSGPT runs inside NetSuite, as a chat panel on the record you're looking at. It reads through a read-only integration role. That role can read lists (customers, vendors, items, accounts, subsidiaries), transactions and financial reports. It has no screen login and no payroll access. Setup is a SuiteApp deployment, arranged with NSGPT and approved by your NetSuite administrator; timing and cost are part of that conversation. Connecting your NetSuite account lists exactly what it adds and every permission the role carries, for your admin to review.
Ten of the twenty run on eight of its nine pre-built queries, each checked against a real NetSuite instance before it shipped:
- 1, A/R aging
- 5, A/P aging
- 7, vendor spend
- 9 and 10, revenue per customer
- 13 and 15, trial balance
- 17, income statement
- 18, balance sheet
- 19, direct cash flow
The pre-built queries take the dates, subsidiary and accounting book as inputs. The ledger statements use book 1, the primary book, unless you name another. Leave the subsidiary off and they cover every subsidiary, each in its own currency, without NetSuite's currency translation. For a US-and-Canada group, that means asking per subsidiary or in each currency, and taking translated consolidated figures from NetSuite's own report. The other ten (2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, 12, 14, 16 and 20) get a query written for the question against NetSuite's documented schema. It comes back with the answer. We don't publish an accuracy rate for that path, so read the query before you rely on the figure. Asking the ledger covers both paths, and how NSGPT answers one ledger question walks a single one through every step. Questions you ask every week can become live dashboards and workbooks; Analytics covers those.
The output can still be wrong, which is why the query and the rows come with it. Bring your three hardest questions from this list to a walkthrough, and we'll ask them of live NetSuite data with the working on screen.
