QuickBooks: Why Growing Companies Need ERP

For most businesses, the key to growth and success lies in greater transaction volumes and speed. But with that volume also comes a need for more complex accounting systems and stronger financial controls.

Many companies start with QuickBooks, but soon find that it lacks many of the capabilities that growing businesses need. They often find themselves relying upon a dangerously unreliable “spreadsheet hairball” to support aging accounting systems. When your team and operations are small, the seemingly low cost of maintaining on-premise systems like QuickBooks masks the cost of inefficiencies during routine tasks.

But as you grow, you’ll find that your business is limited by the manual processes, errors, and lack of real-time data and visibility that comes with having to add systems and constantly engineer short-term quick fixes. At this point, business opportunities that can lead to growth—like mergers and acquisitions, intercompany transactions, and multinational expansion—present challenges instead.

These fast-growing companies are faced with difficult questions, such as:

• How do we take advantage of modern technologies without overloading the business with cost?
• Can modern systems free up information producers to become decision advisors to the wider business?
• Who can we trust to provide a platform for growth that extends well beyond the back office?

IT STARTS IN THE CLOUD

The adoption of cloud-based solutions resolves many of the problems associated with on-premise software: financial activities appear as soon as they’re triggered, and decision-makers can quickly act upon both adverse and favorable business indicators from anywhere in the world. Leaders 
are able to deliver outcomes faster, cheaper and with fewer resources, eliminating the costly maintenance of on-premises hardware and software.

But QuickBooks’ limitations mean companies have to grow by adding more systems or applications for specific purposes: revenue management, fixed assets, procurement, order management, billing, inventory management, services delivery, and more. And if these systems aren’t integrated, your finance staff must maintain half a dozen different applications and risk errors between the disparate programs, each with its own configurations and end-to-end processes.

When all your financial management systems function in standalone silos, even cloud solutions can introduce inefficiencies, integration challenges, IT and administrative overhead of their own. Without integrations across your cloud applications, your fast-growing business will still be forced to navigate multiple applications and data repositories for everyday activities, slowing down processes and reducing the agility that you need for growth.

As a result, your accounting team finds itself doing more work outside of QuickBooks than within it, simply moving your hairball from spreadsheets to a collection of applications.

THE SUITE APPROACH

If your growing enterprise is experiencing any of these pains and QuickBooks is limiting your business growth, it’s time to move your company to an integrated suite of cloud-based solutions and benefit from more efficient and effective business operations.

The integrated suite’s functionality spans the whole of the business, linking both the back- and front offices together. Business processes easily flow from one application and department to another—from sales quote to order, or from procurement to final vendor payment. This is essential for growing an organization and enabling employees to react to client and organizational needs in real time.

By choosing a cloud-based suite of integrated applications, businesses can position themselves for efficiency, cost-effective growth, and improved competitiveness. The suite approach allows you to do more with less, increasing productivity while deferring the hiring costs typically associated with growth.

Simply put, NetSuite can serve as your entire tech stack, scaling with your company and needs and allowing you to use a single platform for all of your business systems. It’s the end of constantly investing capital, time, and resources in new software and integrations—you simply choose what you need, adding the functionality as you grow.

"On one screen we can see how many support tickets are open and how many  new opportunities have come in, and  that helps us manage more effectively.”

WHIPPLEHILL

As a “single source of truth,” the suite approach eliminates the need to piece together different solutions and makes managing data much easier. By tying all of your business processes together, it’s easier to see the clear linkages between what drives profit and what doesn’t. Dual data entry is eliminated since all information is stored in a single, centralized data repository, giving real-time reports on revenue management, fixed assets, procurement, order management, billing, inventory management, services delivery and more.

These and many other benefits separate the world of the old from the new, but customers need to rely upon solid references from growing companies that have already taken the journey to a single solution. There is an increasing number of firms that have migrated from QuickBooks, Microsoft, and others and have shown demonstrable benefits as a result.

For example, education software provider WhippleHill is a fast-growing business that found itself unable to reconcile product support, financial and other issues because the information was housed on disparate IT systems. Financial reporting and billings were hampered by limited visibility and unreliable revenue recognition processes. As a result of its existing QuickBooks and Microsoft SMB software, its growth potential was being inhibited rather than empowered.

WhippleHill swapped out QuickBooks and Microsoft for NetSuite and in the process made the billing processes both simpler and more reliable while integrating customer information and product support information. The end result— a 20% annual growth rate without the need for additional staffing. It’s examples like that that make the case for growing companies to move beyond the limitations imposed by the likes of QuickBooks and Microsoft and to reach out to meet their true potential in the cloud.

Take our ERP System Modernization Assessment and see if your company would benefit by upgrading from QuickBooks.

More Resources

• How to Choose an ERP System
• Enterprise Resource Planning
• 8 Signs QuickBooks is Holding Your Business Back