Best Practices for Using OpenAir Entity Tags

Professional services organizations rely on their PSA tool to provide accurate and complete data in order to operate effectively. It is critical that the data stored in your PSA is accessible, accurate, and meaningful so that your reporting and searches yield the best results.

While NetSuite’s OpenAir PSA’s powerful reporting function grants users access to multiple points of data, most OpenAir data is shown “as-is” – meaning that reports and searches return a field’s current value. However, it is sometimes important to track changes to key data values over time. Luckily, OpenAir’s Entity Tag feature allows you to do exactly that – with some considerations and limitations.

What are OpenAir Entity Tags?

Entity tags, on their surface, are a simple concept – they are tags within user profiles in OpenAir that allow you to track different types of data, such as employment status, business unit or department, location, and much more. Basically, if it can be in a checkbox or a dropdown list as part of a user record, it can be an entity tag.
But what makes these tags unique – and powerful – is the date range tracking associated with them. There are two types of entity tags: Current and Historical. A “Current” entity tag value shows just that – the current value for that resource as of now. The historical entity tag values allow you to assign a start date and end date to an entity tag value. This is the critical element that differentiates entity tags from other types of fields, since both the current and historical information can be viewed, searched for, and reported on.

This is best understood with an example. Let’s say you have a resource who was a subcontractor but has now been converted to a full-time resource. With entity tags, you can see that the current employment status is full-time. But you could also see the date range during which the resource was a subcontractor, allowing you to report on that employee’s data only for the time periods that align with a specific tag value.

While this is a very basic example, in our recent webinar, Best Practices for Using Tags in OpenAir, we go over a variety of examples so that you can better understand the power of adding tags to your users.

Best Practices for Using OpenAir Entity Tags

As mentioned, the concept of entity tags is fairly straightforward. However, their flexibility can add a layer of complexity to resource administration, including the need to update entity tag data when it changes. Effectively using entity tags in OpenAir requires following some best practices to keep the data clean and usable.

First, it’s important to remember that the current tag does not have a start and end date associated with it. If it’s important to track this information, you may need to create an additional entity tag that reflects the current state’s start date, with an end date that extends well into the future. As we’ll discuss below, maintenance for such a process can get complicated and may call for automation in order to ensure data integrity.

The information stored within entity tags is not just searchable – it’s also available for reporting, making these tags incredibly valuable for a professional services organization, especially when it comes to utilization. Adding a utilization tag as a report filter allows you to track and report on only those resources that are billable versus non-billable resources within the organization. (Note: In order to make entity tags searchable you’ll want to make sure that the checkbox “Searchable tag group” is enabled.)

Of course, keeping all this information up-to-date can be cumbersome. Data like employment status, department, and so on may even be duplicated across OpenAir or other platforms. This is an ideal opportunity to leverage the automation of your PSA. Top Step has developed custom scripts for a number of different clients that streamline and automate their entity tag updates, removing the administrative burden and limiting data inconsistency.

We also help customers take advantage of OpenAir’s ability to integrate with other platforms. For instance, by integrating your HR system with your PSA, changes to one system can flow seamlessly to the other, without manual intervention.

Pros and Cons of Entity Tag Usage

While entity tags are a powerful tool within OpenAir, like any tool there are things to consider before adding this feature to your OpenAir usage. Knowing the strengths and limitations of the tags, you’ll be able to make informed decisions about their usage in your own OpenAir implementation.

The cons of using entity tags include:

• Adds complexity to user record administration
• Can seem redundant if similar data is tracked via other fields
• Only available for use with user records

But the pros of entity tags make them highly useful for many organizations:

• Adds date controls to key user data>
• Makes historical data available
• Key to getting strong utilization reporting
• Can be used in Resource searches (Custom search, Advanced Resource search)
• Can be used in Custom Calculation filters
• Enhanced reporting is available with tags that you wouldn’t otherwise have

Conclusion

Entity tags provide a tool for tracking, searching, and reporting on date-driven resource data within your OpenAir PSA instance. They minimize the manual edits needed for reporting, allowing you more granularity with your filters and output options. At the same time, thought should be given towards how entity tags are used and maintained in order to prevent excessive manual updates or the presence of bad data in your environment. There is much more that entity tags can do for you. To see additional examples and suggestions, check out our webinar Best Practices for Using Tags in OpenAir

If you think that entity tags are exactly what you’ve been looking for to take your searches and reporting to a new level, contact Top Step. As we’ve done for many other clients, we can help you understand where entity tags can strengthen your business processes and how best to use them, as well as create custom coding and integrations that make this powerful tool even more effective.