NetSuite has two options for analyzing your data, reports and saved searches. NetSuite's report designer enables non-technical users to modify some canned reports such as income statements, balance sheets, and trial balances. Reports are rigid and have limited support for formulas.

NetSuite saved searches enable users to dive deeper into their NetSuite data and the results are used for business analysis and strategic business decisions. Unlike reports, saved searches can be used to analyze any type of information in NetSuite.

Saved searches enable users to filter their data by adding criteria to their fields. Think of criteria as a filter. A common criteria field is a date field where a user could add a dynamic filter such as "Transaction date within the last 30 days". In this scenario, every time the search is executed the results will dynamically display only the data from the last 30 days.

In addition to criteria, saved searches enable users to add results fields. Results can even come from related tables. For example, a user may want to analyze sales by country. Sales data comes from the sales order table while country data comes from the customer table. When building a saved search users can add the country from the customer table as well as the sales detail from the sales table and very quickly be able to see the sales by country.

Saved searches also provide advanced functionality with support for formulas including SQL. Formulas can be used in both criteria and results fields.