There’s no doubting that QuickBooks, the online accounting system released in 1992 for small businesses, has worked for many companies in the past and will continue to be valuable for many in the future.
But for companies that want to focus on growth, and need to be able to do more with their accounting while also consolidating other business activities under a single roof, there comes a time when QuickBooks just can’t cut it. And we see a lot of common signs that small businesses go through in their growth when they finally have to say, “Enough is enough.”
If you have to use Excel or other standalone programs to fill in the gaps. For more complex accounting situations, like revenue recognition for software companies that licence their products, QuickBooks just might not be enough to create all the reports that your business needs to understand its current situation. If you’re using Excel to create different reports, or are trying to manually bridge data inside QuickBooks alongside a separate spreadsheet, you’re losing productivity and potentially lacking visibility into game-changing insights.
Your business’ volume is simply too much, whether it’s transactions or people. File size limits are a common problem among businesses reaching the end of QuickBooks’ value. Data needs to be purged on a somewhat regular basis just for the program to run properly. On top of that, if you have five or ten people logging transactions simultaneously, the risk of corrupted data increases. Many businesses also just have too many people vying for access to QuickBooks, leading to fights over user licenses or being forced to take turns.
You have to deal with complex revenue recognition. QuickBooks just isn’t setup to handle complex revenue recognition schemes, which many software and professional services companies must follow in order to stay compliant. Again, if you’re relying on additional plugins or applications in order to make your revenue recognition scheme work properly in Quickbooks, it’s time to look elsewhere.
Accounting compliance is a critical part of your business. Many businesses do contract work for the government, whether that’s defence or providing IT infrastructure. Direct or subcontracted work might require complex invoicing reporting or specific reporting styles that might simply be impossible to implement in QuickBooks.
You struggle to support a mobile workforce. For professional services companies, enabling mobile employees is absolutely critical—they need to be able to address concerns while they’re working with clients and you need to know what they’ve been up to. People need to be able to access systems that work the way they do.
Too much spend on discrete systems. Because QuickBooks is built solely for accounting, you might be using a different system for handling ERP functions within your business, and yet another for CRM. Add in a few more for marketing processes, and it’s either a hefty monthly bill or a difficult process to onboard new employees to a number disparate processes that don’t necessarily sync up.
Always playing catch-up rather than building new success stories. It’s a story we’ve heard again and again: QuickBooks can give you solid reports as to past performance, but you need real-time visibility into how the business is performing. You need to be able to take action based on today’s environment, not the environment from last month, or even the last six months. By sticking with QuickBooks, you’re constantly looking backwards rather than developing strategies that will make your business stronger.
If you feel yourself running up against any of these QuickBooks pain points, it’s time to start thinking about the next steps. It doesn’t have to be scary—our Modelworks change management platform will not only help move your accounting to NetSuite’s responsive cloud platform, but will also pull a number of business processes onto a single, coordinated platform that will offer all the insights you need.
Start 2017 right with some new visibility into the best ways to make your business grow.