Mastering global search
NetSuite is built a single-source system and what’s powerful about this is it allows for all of your business records to be indexed together and searchable together. This makes the NetSuite Global Search bar very powerful.
Use the NetSuite Global Search Prefixes
Type the first few words of the record type your looking for (i.e. “sale” for a sales order, “cu” for a customer) then a colon (:), and then your search query to narrow your search to just records of that type.
As an example to search my customer list for my customer ABC Company I’d type cu: ABC Company in the Global Search bar.
Here are some to get you started:
| Prefix | Record Type |
| cash | Cash Sale |
| con | Contact |
| cu | Customer |
| emp | Employee |
| fi | File |
| invo | Invoice |
| it | Item |
| po | Purchase Order |
| so | Sales Order |
| ve | Vendor |
Use the Wildcard Character (%)
If you are not exactly sure what you are looking for, wildcards allow a little wiggle room in your search by adding it to the beginning and end of a string.
% Sign:
The most helpful to the average NetSuite user is perhaps the % wildcard. For example, if inv:101 is entered, Global Search will return all invoices with 110 as the invoice number. The % wildcard can be used before or after to indicate ends with or starts with text to filter search records.
_Underscore:
Use an _ underscore (search cust:a_b) to produce customer records containing the specific letters you are looking for.
Include Inactive Records (+)
Use any query but include a plus sign (+) after your search to also include any inactive records in your results.
Find Exact Matches (“”)
Wrap your query in quotation marks ("") to get exact text matches.
And more besides!
| @ | Search by specific record ID (e.g., @1234) |
| # | Search by specific transaction number (e.g., #5678) |
| ! | Search by custom record type (e.g., !Customer) |
| \ | Wildcard search (e.g., *Apple*) |
| " | Exact phrase search (e.g., "John Doe") |
| + | Boolean AND operator (e.g., keyword1 + keyword2) |
| - | Boolean NOT operator (e.g., keyword1 -keyword2) |
| OR | Boolean OR operator (e.g., keyword1 OR keyword2) |
| < | Less than (e.g., <100) |
| <= | Less than or equal to (e.g., <=200) |
| > | Greater than (e.g., >50) |
| >= | Greater than or equal to (e.g., >=75) |