What’s the Problem?

“This is getting a bit repetitive, opening sales order after sales order, pasting the same value in the Memo box, clicking the same big blue Save button. Uhgh!” – frustrated NetSuite User. 

“Why not try a Mass Update? Give me 2 seconds.” – SuiteRep (saves the day). 

What is a Mass Update in NetSuite?

So, what exactly is a mass update in NetSuite? When I need to perform an update on every transaction record in NetSuite and I have 100,000 transactions to update, I most certainly don’t want to open every single transaction to edit it. I like to sleep too. 

And this is where the mass updates come in. There is a plethora of useful actions that a mass update can perform, like sending bulk emails, adding items to a collection, activating and deactivating certain records (like customers and vendors), etc.  

So, you can begin to see the power that a mass update brings to a NetSuite user. And the best thing about them is that you can use the awesome NetSuite search capabilities to narrow down the records on which you want to run the action! How cool is that??

Anyway, enough hype. Let’s get down to business. 

Running a Mass Update

Since there are many different types of mass updates, we will focus on running an update on a field that you, the NetSuite admin or user, recently added to a record type. For example, let’s say you added a checkbox on the Vendors called “Is Awesome,” and now you want to update it to tell everyone that the Vendor is awesome. 

1. Navigate to Lists > Mass Update > Mass Updates. Your screen should now generally look like this below, where there is a list of all the kinds of updates that can be run. 

2. An action like updating a field on a record is classified as a General Update on the Vendor record. So click on General Updates > Vendor (you may have to scroll a bit). This is what you should see now.

Notice how this looks strikingly similar to the saved search home page. In fact, this is exactly what this page does: it allows you to define the search criteria for the records you want to update. You don’t really want to run the update on every single Sales Order that has ever existed, do you?

3. Next, under the Criteria tab, set the criteria that you want the records you are updating to have, just like you would search for the records that you want to update. Suppose you want to say that all your Vendors from Canada are awesome. So you set the Country criteria to Canada, like below.

4. Click on the Preview button to see if you matched anything.

With the Apply checkbox, you can select which records you want to limit the search on, say if you want to test the update on one record. The Perform Update button will do exactly what it says. Return To Criteria lets you continue to edit the criteria and set other configurations for the mass update.

5. Since we just wanted to see what records were going to be updated, click Return To Criteria to continue with the setup.

6. Go under the Mass Update Fields tab, where you will see a list of the available fields to update. Note: Hidden fields are not included.

With the Apply checkbox, you can select the field you want to update; in this case, select the “Is Awesome” checkbox. The neat thing is that the Mass Update functionality shows you the kind of field you are updating, e.g., checkbox, list/record, field/text, etc.

7. Selecting the field you want to update in the list allows you to put a value in the field or use a formula to compute the value for the field. In this case, we check the “Is Awesome” checkbox.

8. Click Preview and then Perform Update to run the updates on the records that are selected. This will lead you to the screen below showing you the success/failure of the update.

Conclusion

If you have any questions on running a mass update in NetSuite, or even the different types of mass updates, you can send us a message via our chat, and we will do our best to reply in a timely manner. Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe for more helpful NetSuite tips. Cheers from the SuiteRep Team.

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