For many small and mid-sized businesses, QuickBooks is the preferred choice for financial software in the organization’s early days—and for solid reasons. QuickBooks is well-known and easy to use, and it offers the basic functionality that almost any business can use to get off the ground.
Unfortunately, virtually every growing business also soon realizes that the undeniable early value of QuickBooks—and even QuickBooks Online—is soon overtaken by the limitations and compromises that emerge. Perhaps your organization has already run up against some of these barriers: inflexible processes, data accessibility issues, inadequate security, and primitive reporting.
Outgrowing QuickBooks is a good thing, but only if you realize it’s time to move forward. When’s the right time to make the move? Which options should you consider? What are the hidden costs of waiting? The decision is different for every growing business, but one thing is clear – a growing business needs a scalable business-class ERP financial software solution to operate with peak efficiency.
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If any of these questions prompts an affirmative, you are ready for life after QuickBooks.
- Are you trapped by workarounds, extra steps, manual data entry, and patched-together analyses?
- Do you have an over-reliance on spreadsheets to support financial process and reporting?
- Is your finance team operating with excess manual data entry and re-entry – resulting in human errors?
- Do you currently have limited access to reports and information to drive real-time, data-informed decisions?
- Are you facing the reality that you are operating with increasingly inadequate controls around your financial processes?
- Are you exporting data to multiple spreadsheets? Setting up dummy accounts? Creating additional journal entries each month?
- Be honest, have you created home-grown applications for recording revenue or expenses outside of QuickBooks?
Despite its popularity as a business application for small business, QuickBooks simply wasn’t designed for growing organizations that need advanced functionality to manage sophisticated processes.
To accurately forecast your business opportunities and plan proactively, you need an overarching view of operations and the ability to identify process gaps and areas of strength. You can’t do that with a financial solution that limits collaboration, doesn’t provide adequate data controls, and can’t integrate with your other data sources, systems, and applications. However, despite the inefficiencies and hidden costs of QuickBooks, it’s all too easy to simply postpone the cash outlay to step up to a more robust, automated, scalable solution. Fortunately, today’s advanced cloud ERP systems offer smart economics that make them a cost-effective alternative to sticking with QuickBooks too long.
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Keep in mind, cloud-based financial management applications offer finance organizations the solutions they need to work strategically with stakeholders by providing the financial data to plan the business’s future, gain new insights, and make important financial decisions. Don’t worry, there absolutely is life after QuickBooks!
Intacct’s cloud-based financial management solution, offers a better way, with sophisticated—but still easy to use—functionality such as: fast consolidations, multi-entity support, currency conversions, smart revenue recognition, and more.