Every account has one
Every NetSuite account seems to have one: the admin who's the only person who can touch the thing.
A sys admin shared on Reddit that they'd built a vendor onboarding flow in NetSuite. It works. The catch: now every change to the form lands on their desk as a ticket.
I laughed, then winced, because I've seen this so many times. Someone builds something useful. It works. And from that day on, they're its only keeper.
We've been here before
This problem is not entirely new. Another example we all know is Excel.
Maybe an analyst built a spreadsheet and emailed it around. Then that thing quietly becomes critical, and nobody notices until its owner goes on holiday. Suddenly half the finance team is reverse-engineering somebody else's formulas.
NetSuite just raises the stakes. The spreadsheet lived on one laptop. The workflow lives in the system that runs your orders, your invoices and your close.
AI makes it better and worse
AI makes this better and worse at the same time.
Better, because more people can build. Someone who has never written SuiteScript can now get a working script in an afternoon.
Worse, because more gets built that still only one person understands. Sometimes not even that one person: they asked, it worked, they shipped it. The knowledge didn't move from one head to many. It moved from one head to none.
People as the integration layer
Zoom out and you see the same pattern between systems, not just inside one. Data that should flow on its own gets reconciled by hand. Workarounds pile up. And people quietly end up acting as the integration layer: the one who knows which export goes where, which number to trust, which step to skip on a Friday.
None of that shows up on an org chart. It shows up when that person is out.
The fix isn't another admin
The instinct is to hire a second admin. But that just gives you two people who each hold half the picture.
The fix isn't another admin. It's this: how do you democratize knowledge so you don't have a single point of failure in the first place?
Document while you build
AI is your friend here, as long as it documents while you're building.
The same model that writes the script can write down what it does, why it's there and what it touches, at the moment that's cheapest to capture. Not eighteen months later, when someone is trying to work out why the vendor form has a field called "temp".
That's the idea behind Splotch: a living map of what your system does, kept current as it changes, that anyone in the business can read, not just the person who built it.
The goal isn't to stop people building. It's to make sure that when your admin goes on holiday, the business doesn't.
From Kevin Lorenz
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