Why Your NetSuite Integration Keeps Breaking (And How to Fix It)

I've lost count of how many times I've had to untangle a NetSuite integration that someone set up and then left to rot. It's always the same story — it worked fine for three months, then orders started failing silently, inventory got out of sync, and by the time anyone noticed, the finance team was reconciling spreadsheets at midnight.

If your NetSuite integration keeps breaking, it's probably one of these.

You're not handling saved search changes

This one catches people out all the time. Someone on the NetSuite side updates a saved search — adds a column, changes a filter, renames a field — and suddenly your integration pulls the wrong data or pulls nothing at all.

I've seen this happen with inventory syncs especially. A well-meaning admin tweaks a saved search to fix a reporting issue, not realising an integration flow depends on it. Nothing errors out. The data just stops being correct.

The fix isn't complicated — document which saved searches your integrations depend on, and lock them down. In NetSuite, you can restrict who can edit specific saved searches. Do it. And if you're building on Celigo, use the NetSuite connector's native search capabilities rather than referencing saved searches where possible. That way you control the query from the integration side.

Your error handling is "log and pray"

Be honest — when a record fails to sync, what happens? If the answer is "it goes into an error log that nobody checks," you've got a problem.

I've worked on environments where the Celigo error dashboard had thousands of unresolved errors dating back months. At that point it's not an error log, it's a graveyard.

Good error handling means three things. First, categorise errors — a missing mandatory field is different from a rate limit timeout, and they need different responses. Second, set up automatic retries for transient failures like API timeouts. Three to five retries with exponential backoff handles most of these. Third, route persistent errors to someone who can actually fix them. A Slack notification or an email alert — whatever works for your team. But someone needs to own it.

You're ignoring NetSuite's concurrency limits

NetSuite has governance limits. If you're running multiple integration flows that hit NetSuite simultaneously — say, an order sync, an inventory update, and a customer sync all firing at the same time — you'll hit concurrency limits and requests will start failing.

This is especially common during peak periods. Your integration works fine during the week, then Black Friday hits and everything falls over because the volume quadruples and your flows are all competing for the same API slots.

The solution is scheduling. Stagger your flows so they don't overlap. Prioritise the most critical ones — usually orders — and let less time-sensitive syncs like product updates run during off-peak hours. On Celigo, you can configure queue management and concurrency settings per flow. Use them.

Your field mappings assume clean data

Every integration I've inherited has at least one field mapping that assumes the source data is always clean and complete. It never is.

Customer records with no email address. Orders with a shipping method that doesn't exist in your ERP. Product SKUs with trailing spaces. These things break integrations in subtle ways — the record might still sync, but with wrong or missing data that causes problems downstream.

Build your mappings defensively. Use default values for non-critical fields. Validate mandatory fields before the sync attempts to create the record. And for fields like addresses, phone numbers, and emails — clean them before they hit NetSuite. A bit of transformation logic upfront saves hours of manual cleanup later.

You built it once and never revisited it

This is the big one. Integration isn't a "set and forget" thing. Your business changes — new products, new sales channels, new warehouses, new tax rules. Your integration needs to evolve with it.

I've seen integrations that were perfectly designed for the business two years ago but are now held together with workarounds and manual overrides because nobody went back to update the logic.

Schedule a quarterly review of your integration flows. Check error rates, look at processing times, and ask the people who use the data whether it's accurate. It doesn't need to be a big project — an hour or two of review can catch issues before they become crises.

Where to start

If you're reading this and recognising your own setup, start with the errors. Go through your error dashboard, categorise what's failing, and fix the highest-volume issues first. Then work backwards through the list above.

And if your integration is so far gone that fixing it feels overwhelming — sometimes it's more efficient to redesign the flows from scratch with proper error handling and monitoring built in. It's not the answer anyone wants to hear, but a well-architected integration pays for itself in the time you stop spending on firefighting.

If you want a second pair of eyes on your NetSuite integration, get in touch. I've debugged enough of these to spot the common issues pretty quickly.