New Labor Costs and Revenue Report Requires SuitePeople U.S. Payroll and New Permission

What changed

NetSuite added a new Labor Costs and Revenue Report under Reports > Financial > Labor Costs and Revenue Report. The report pulls up to two years of paycheck data from SuitePeople U.S. Payroll and compares labor costs against income-account revenue. It supports slicing by period, subsidiary, department, location, class, and other segments.

Key components

• Labor Costs Configuration record — a new setup page at Setup > Accounting > Labor Costs Configuration where you define which payroll elements (Earnings/Wages, Employer Payroll Taxes, Employer Benefit Contributions) roll into labor cost calculations. Multiple named configurations are supported; one can be marked as the default.
• Report filters — date range by reporting period, column-based segment filtering (class, department, quarter, year), and an income-account selector (Account any of list). An optional checkbox includes off-cycle runs, reversals, and adjustments that are excluded by default.
• AI Insights — a Generate Insight button produces an AI-written summary with sections: Executive Summary, Key Metrics, Key Drivers, and Key Takeaways for Leadership. Oracle does not document which model or service backs this; treat the output as supplementary, not authoritative.

Permissions

Out-of-the-box roles with access to both financials and payroll (e.g., CFO) see the report automatically. For custom roles, you must add the new Labor Costs permission at the Full level. Without it the report menu item will not appear.

What to do

1. Verify module prerequisite — This report is gated on SuitePeople U.S. Payroll. If your account does not have this module enabled, the report and configuration page will not be available.
2. Create at least one Labor Costs Configuration — Navigate to Setup > Accounting > Labor Costs Configuration and define which payroll earnings, employer taxes, and benefit contributions should be included. Mark one configuration as the default so the report has a baseline calculation.
3. Update custom roles — Any custom role that needs access must have the Labor Costs permission set to Full. Audit your role list; the permission will not be present on existing custom roles by default.
4. Review income accounts — The revenue side of the report pulls from income accounts selectable via the Account any of filter. Confirm your chart of accounts has the relevant income accounts properly classified so the comparison is meaningful.
5. Decide on off-cycle inclusion — By default the report excludes off-cycle payroll runs, reversals, and adjustments. If your labor cost analysis should include these, toggle the checkbox each time or instruct users on the expected setting.
6. Integration note — Oracle does not document any SuiteScript, REST, or SOAP API surface for this report or its configuration record. If you need to automate configuration creation or extract report data programmatically, you will need to verify whether the Labor Costs Configuration record is scriptable via N/record and whether a saved-search or N/query data source exists for the underlying dataset. As of this writing, the documentation is silent on both.

Caveats

• The release version for this feature is not stated in the source documentation. Confirm availability in your account's release notes or by checking the menu paths above in your sandbox.
• The AI Insights feature (Generate Insight) has no documented configuration, model selection, or governance-unit cost. Test in sandbox and verify whether it counts against any AI credit allocation in your contract.
• The report is limited to two years of paycheck history. For longer-horizon analysis you will still need custom saved searches or SuiteAnalytics workbooks against payroll transaction records.