QuickBooks Archives

QuickBooks is an obvious go-to finance software solution for startups and SMEs. In fact, QuickBooks dominates the off-the-shelf accounting software market with a 62 percent lion share. This is because it is simple, easy to use, inexpensive, and familiar.

The problem with QuickBooks

As a generic small business accounting software, QuickBooks has some serious drawbacks. First of all, it is not designed for heavy lifting, making it nearly impossible to work on complex data with multiple variables. It also lacks sophisticated financial management functions such as advanced cash flow analytics, tracking, comprehensive reporting, and resource management.

Thirdly, QuickBooks’s primary functions are only centered around accounting, and their scope is limited to the very basics. This means you would still need other business management software to work alongside QuickBooks to fully digitize your enterprise. A business can quickly outgrow the platform once its financial transactions exceed a certain threshold.

Signs that your accounting needs are beyond QuickBooks

It is easy to bottom out QuickBooks’s capabilities without even realizing it. Here are the signs that your business needs a more robust small business accounting software:

Reliance on additional accounting solutions

Once you hit QuickBooks’s functionality limits, you might find yourself looking for additional tools to fill in the gaps. Your accountants may revert to primitive methods such as manual calculations and spreadsheets or seek out more effective accounting facilities elsewhere. If you have to process your finances using multiple systems, then QuickBooks is failing as your primary accounting software.

An expanding enterprise

You cannot realistically expect a rigid small business accounting software to match a growing business’s needs. According to QuickBooks’s user agreement, each license has a limit for the number of users, data storage, and file size. Since there is nothing you can do about these limits, it is impossible to scale the system’s performance beyond a certain point. This then becomes a problem when you want to increase your staff, sign new vendors, increase inventory caches, or open more locations.

New demands for complex resource management

Financial management and business accounting are growing more complicated due to increasingly sophisticated business models. Consolidating multiple income streams, managing dynamic inventory, tracking cash flow, analyzing financial performance, and automating entangled processes can be too much for a simple small business accounting software.

Nowadays, accounting is not just about balancing the books. Thanks to intelligent data systems, you can get a lot more from your financial information. If you are struggling to draw useful insights from your data or run complex accounting processes using QuickBooks, you need a digital upgrade.

The solution: upgrading to an ERP system

Having outgrown QuickBooks, the next step is to upgrade to an enterprise resource planning solution. ERP is a holistic business management software suite that integrates all the vital back-office functions from supply and distribution, sales, workflow management, and resource control to analytics.

Accounting is often tied to most of the core business processes, so it makes sense to have an enterprise-wide digital solution that covers financial management and all its dependencies. Unlike a small business accounting software, a centralized EPR solution shows you the whole picture and links every process through a common platform.

According to a recent report, 64 percent of organizations implement ERP solutions to improve their overall business performance — ERPs are not just for accounting.

Even better still is a cloud ERP that lets you manage a single establishment or multiple business locations remotely and conveniently. Acumatica is an ideal cloud ERP solution for businesses looking for more than the usual balance sheets from accounting software. Get in touch with us and learn how this powerful cloud ERP can help propel your business.

Businesses rely on accurate financial management and many describe finances as the very lifeblood of the company. Many decisions are based on current financial figures, which is why reliable accounting software is such a necessity. However, over time basic accounting software no longer fits the bill, so to speak, and an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution makes more sense.

Entry-level accounting software, such as QuickBooks, can work successfully for a time. These solutions offer basic financial management activities such as monitoring income and expenses, populating bank statements, and paying bills. You may be able to create invoices and print financial reports; however, there isn’t much more you can get out of entry-level accounting software. A secondary problem often presents itself some time later – basic software can only handle a limited volume of data and a limited number of users. With growth, your business generates more and more data that can quickly bog down the software, making it difficult to process data and reports. Additional delays can occur as employees have to wait to enter or retrieve information needed to make important business decisions. Before basic accounting software begins to stifle growth, make the change to a stronger business management solution.

You can manage all of your business operations with a modern ERP solution including financial transactions, supply chain and inventory, manufacturing and distribution operations, human resources and payroll activities, and other core business processes. You can enter, access, and analyze data with greater efficiency when it’s located within a single, centralized solution. In addition, data is seamlessly shared between processes. For example, you can create a proposal or contract for a customer and turn that data into a purchase order, and later, an invoice. This and other time-saving automations reduces the time spent handling data and improves the productivity of your team. Powerful ERP solutions also offer business intelligence and reporting features that make it easier to identify trends, uncover ways to control spending or reduce waste, and further improve business processes.
As your business grows, you need more than basic accounting software. Choose a solution that can provide the insight you need to make data-driven decisions, improve productivity and profitability, and support superior customer service.

Contact AppSolute for more information about making the switch from entry-level accounting software to modern ERP.

By AppSolute Consulting Group, LLC, Microsoft, Accumatica and Sage Partner out of New York

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