Product development efforts are continuing as normal at NetSuite Inc. despite its looming acquisition by Oracle Corp. and the shareholder efforts to block the deal.

At least that’s the impression the cloud giant is attempting to put forward at its annual partner event today in London, where it’s showcasing a new iteration of its OpenAir resource management service designed to help financial professionals become more productive.

Most of the usability improvements in the release focus on speeding up the small but repetitive tasks involved in managing a large company’s balance sheet. A revamped interface enables users to quickly find important information on workers and projects, while an automated data entry tool streamlines the task of logging complicated accounting entries like labor expenses. And OpenAir now also provides the ability to create custom cost fields in the event that the built-in categories don’t cut it.

NetSuite sees the latter feature coming handy mainly for managing expenses that are unique to certain industries, such as construction equipment and HIPAA compliance audits. The ability to neatly file every such costs under their own categories has a couple of major benefits. First, financial professionals will be able to organize their records more effectively And second, the custom fields should facilitate the creation of better briefs for decision-makers via OpenAir’s reporting console, which has also been improved as part of the release.

The biggest addition is a new automated data sorting algorithm that NetSuite says makes it possible to create advanced reports using information from multiple systems without turning to the IT department. Moreover, senior personnel within a company’s financial department now have the option of manually approving individual figures to make their data more convincing for the top brass.

The new functionality is the latest product of NetSuite’s efforts to maintain its lead in the cloud-based enterprise resource management space, which is among the more lucrative segments of the software-as-a-service industry. The provider reported total revenues of $230.8 million in its most recent fiscal quarter, up a massive 30 percent from a year ago. With this rapid growth in mind, it’s small wonder that Oracle is willing to pay $9.3 million for the firm.

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