What’s your best practice in designing your item catalog when you’re in an IT consulting industry that sells both licenses and services? We’re looking to redesign our item records in a way that follow principles of unit economics that will allow us to see which among our items are best performing in terms of profitability.

Well you know Netsuite is going to be ideal for this. The Item Catalogue is just one part. How much granularity are you prepared to apply to pre-sales efforts, delivery cost allocation, recording phone interactions, allocating overheads to "products." Some of these are unknowns. I would start a reporting output in a spreadsheet with manual calc initially. This identifies the calculation process. Build your data input as saved searches which would identify the missing pieces. I feel that the Netsuite Items have so many options plus classes, dept, locatons plus custom segments that Items wouldn't be the restriction on calculating unit economics. Sales & Item analysis are easy, it's your costs and efforts that are you challenge.