Workflows are one of my least favorite things to work on. Why?  There’s so many intricacies to it and so many ways things can go wrong.

I had to revisit an old expense report approval process workflow when suddenly our executive team was being barraged by emails. Trouble was, the emails weren’t coming from our custom workflow that was supposed to handle it, instead they were coming from a Netsuite Standard workflow around expense approvals. I’ve frequently had frustrations with these invisible workflows that we cannot see or review in the system even moreso when I don’t have the option turned on to enable the expense report approval process.  Futhermore, I couldn’t even see the emails going out as they’re not captured in a message record or on any employee record.

Frustrating right?  So I reached out to Netsuite Support for help (which should be oxymoron based on my experiences). They recommended I turn off ‘Automatically Notify Supervisors’ which ended up having downstream impacts and affecting more than the expense approval process.

Anyway, to fix this issue I had to implement the same email functionality.  You can’t simply put in a send email action in workflows without taking into account the context and everything else. For instance, I originally put it in a new start shape so it would only go through there once, however, I realized the send email action doesn’t function on ‘before submit’ when users are saving the record. A bit of trial and error later and I get it working in an after-submit context and sending properly. By this time, however, I now had to manually send HUNDREDS of emails out to employees who didn’t get it the past day or so of fighting this particular issue. I solved for this in a button action and mass update but this is exactly the kind of thing that I wish worked better in the system. There can be many painpoints in Netsuite from wish NS Support was a bit more observant to wishing there were better ways to see native netsuite workflows and functions to wishing there were better testing methods available for active workflows. Oh well, here’s to dreaming…