tessera-docs
Tessera — Documentation
Native business intelligence built inside NetSuite. Architecture, engineering principles, security model, and SuiteCloud compliance reference.
What Tessera is
NetSuite is a serious platform. Its general ledger is sound. Its period locking is real. Its subsidiary model handles things that would break most ERPs. The people who built it made consequential decisions well.
What it doesn’t do — and was never designed to do — is turn those carefully maintained books into a governed, auditable, Controller-signed financial reporting layer that lives inside the same system. That work has always been pushed out to spreadsheets, to external BI tools, to data warehouses that copy your data somewhere else and call it analysis. Each handoff is a place where the audit trail breaks, where a number becomes a question instead of a fact.
Tessera closes that gap without leaving NetSuite. Every metric is defined inside NetSuite, approved inside NetSuite, computed from NetSuite’s own tables, and displayed on a NetSuite dashboard. No ETL. No copy of your data somewhere else. No “as of last night’s sync.” The Controller signs the metric definition the same way they sign a journal entry — and that signature travels with the number everywhere it appears.
It is not a criticism of the platform. It is what the platform was always pointing toward.
Architecture
Tessera is built on five layers, all running as SuiteScript 2.1 inside the SuiteCloud platform:
| Layer | Purpose |
|---|---|
| MDL — Metric Definition Layer | Governed metric definitions: formula, version chain, approval status, Controller sign-off |
| MLL — Metric Lineage Layer | Version resolution, effective-date logic, supersession chain |
| SIL — Semantic Intelligence Layer | Query orchestration, formula evaluation, saved search integration |
| CRL — Cache & Refresh Layer | Event-driven invalidation, Map/Reduce computation fleet, closed-period immutability |
| Data | NetSuite’s own tables — PostingAccountActivity, transactionLine, AccountingPeriod — nothing copied, nothing replicated |
The design applies Domain-Driven Design, CQRS, Hexagonal Architecture, and branded types to a platform most people treat as a scripting environment. Where those patterns deviate from common practice, they’re documented and the reasoning is explicit.
Interactive Diagrams
Five standalone HTML documents that render in any browser.
| Diagram | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Architecture Overview | The five-layer stack with every named component. Click any component to expand. |
| MDL Record Map | All 18 custom record types, grouped by governance layer, with descriptions and relationships. |
| Data Flow Explorer | Six interactive scenarios — trace a metric through creation, recalculation, display, staleness, version update, and governance comparison. |
| Trust Chain | How a single CFO dashboard number traces back through sign-off, computed result, component queries, and raw NetSuite tables. |
| Instance Setup | Seven steps from bundle install to first portlet placement. |
| MDL Entity Relationships | Entity-relationship diagram — ownership hierarchy, cardinality, version chain. |
Architecture & Engineering
- Architecture Overview
- Architectural Foundations
- Engineering Principles
- Data Layer Reference
- Security Model
- Why Controllers Trust Tessera