As a starter system, QuickBooks is a logical and economical choice. It provides the basic functionality that companies need to get going, supports a chart of accounts and manages both accounts payable and receivable. But QuickBooks could also be holding businesses back from achieving their full potential. And not just QuickBooks customers, but the partners and independent accountants that support them. As companies start to grow, expand internationally, or encounter more complex financial reporting requirements, their dependency on the QuickBooks system can turn into a burden.
That’s because this general ledger system doesn’t manage inventory across multiple sales channels; provide insights into the products that companies have on hand at a given time; streamline their ordering processes; or manage the reams of data that these companies receive and generate daily. It can also fall short when it’s time to add a new business, analyze sales or manage complicated cash flow reporting. Indeed, QuickBooks can hold back a fast-growing business.
For independent accounting professionals and other businesses supporting the QuickBooks ecosystem, this means their fastest-growing, most successful clients are either seeing their growth slow, or walking out the door when they move to a different system. Unless they support a more sophisticated system like NetSuite, these partners constantly need to replace successful clients with smaller, less established customers.
Though most customers probably recognize the shortfalls of QuickBooks and the need to innovate to keep pace, some may be reluctant to upgrade, replace, or enhance their business systems. Others aren’t convinced that they’ll be able to find a solution that can affordably meet their needs, choosing to instead just “make do.” Unfortunately, those decisions can turn out even more costly in the long run.
Partnering with BCS ProSoft will be a key factor in helping businesses determine when the time is right to move on to a more sophisticated accounting system and what products might be right for them.
Here are five signs that it’s time for businesses to look beyond QuickBooks to grow their business:
1. They’re not sure what’s happening across their businesses.
When departments, management groups, and teams can’t share information, tools, priorities, and goals, the siloed mentality kicks into gear and takes over. Companies can break out of this mindset by deploying a financial system that generates and shares insights and data in real-time across the entire enterprise.
2. Financial consolidation across systems takes ages.
As they grow, businesses may find themselves dealing with a bewildering complexity of foreign currencies and languages, accounting standards, taxation structures/reporting, and compliance requirements that far outstrip the capabilities of the standalone accounting applications they’d traditionally used for financial consolidation. Cloud computing offers a scalable model for sophisticated financial consolidation in a fraction of the time and without the substantial capital expenditure of a typical on-premise ERP system. And by automating key accounting processes, a cloud ERP solution minimizes the risk of error and delay of manual approaches to multiple charts of accounts.
3. Adding new sales channels, product lines or revenue streams (domestically or internationally) is extremely difficult.
As businesses mature and their market share increases, they will surely hit the outer limits of growth in their current markets. To implement growth strategies and gain a competitive edge in the world market, they need an integrated business system that centralizes accounting, order management, customer relationship management (CRM) and eCommerce processes. When everyone has access to the same customer information and transactions, it’s easier to respond quickly to customer inquiries. It allows salespeople to spot opportunities to cross-sell and upsell, and teams can confidently track pending orders, service issues or overdue invoices.
They’re using more Excel spreadsheets and third-party applications to connect data.
These band-aid solutions don’t “talk” or share data, which means more human intervention, manual data reentry, errors and steps in the financial management process. With a cloud financial management platform, your clients’ marketing, finance, sales and inventory managers can all pull the exact data they need to understand trends and improve the accuracy of their forecasting. Because they all draw from the same data source, these users will have a more holistic insight into customer behavior at each stage of the transaction, and without the need for spreadsheets or bolt-on applications.
They need better revenue recognition, allocations, planning & budgeting and/or better reporting insights.
Financial reporting isn’t getting any easier, and it can be especially challenging for companies that are growing, expanding into new lines of business or exploring their global horizons.
If a business is dealing with any or all of these issues, it’s likely a sign that they’ve outgrown their current systems. A comprehensive solution from BCS ProSoft supports all aspects of a business by unifying financials, sales, project and product management, ordering, invoicing, and revenue recognition on a single platform. It will also help your firm minimize complexity across a broad range of operations, allowing insights into the entire business based on a single, customizable platform.
Contact BCS ProSoft for an evaluation on which solution from Sage, NetSuite, or Deltek is the best fit for your business.
