Have You Outgrown QuickBooks? Upgrade To A Cloud ERP System

Intuit’s QuickBooks is a popular choice for business accounting software, and with good reason. It’s user-friendly, affordable and widely used. QuickBooks offers excellent value — in the small business environment. As distribution organizations become larger, however, they may need to find a more scalable, robust platform, such as a cloud ERP system.

But how do you know when you’ve outgrown QuickBooks? There’s no pat answer, since growth may be in the form of larger transaction sizes or an increased number of users who need access to your business accounting software. A company’s physical size may also be a factor, especially if you need to manage multiple business locations.

As businesses grow, the drawbacks of QuickBooks soon become evident, according to a recent article on Enterpreneur.com. These drawbacks may include:

1. Limited functionality: The software’s enterprise-level solution only permits 30 simultaneous users, and it tends to be inefficient when you need to add a new business or consolidate accounting for multiple businesses.
2. Data restrictions: The maximum file size is 1.5 GB for QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions, according to Entrepreneur.com. And while it’s able to handle common business accounting software tasks, more complex data analysis requires a more robust platform, such as a cloud ERP.
3. Compliance concerns: If your business handles complex government contracts, for example, some reporting may be “difficult or impossible to implement,” Entrepreneur.com notes.

If these issues are starting to cause headaches in your organization, start looking for a new business accounting software solution.

Trying to get by with a QuickBooks and spreadsheets tends to only exacerbate your problems. Spreadsheets typically become silos of information, and other people in the organization can’t access data reliably. Relying on spreadsheets when making important business decisions may also cause problems. Formula errors tend to creep in over time, especially with documents shared among several users. Someone adds a column or a row, and for some reason it doesn’t get added into the total formula; now, your numbers aren’t correct, even though they don’t necessarily look wrong.

And then there’s the manual effort that’s typically required with entering and maintaining a spreadsheet. That time could be used better somewhere else if a cloud ERP system were providing that information automatically.

Switching from spreadsheets and QuickBooks to a cloud ERP system offers many benefits for distributors, depending on your specific business needs and activities.

For example, moving to a more robust ERP platform should provide better inventory control and more advanced inventory evaluation tools. Multi-location inventory management is usually better, in particular. Other advanced functions that larger organizations might need include automated serial and lot number controls, and good audit trails on transactions.

What really sets a cloud ERP system apart in this context, however, is its ability to serve as demand planning software, allowing inventory managers to know what quantity to order of a particular product and when to order it in order to maintain the optimal stock on hand.

In the end, as organizations grow, they’re likely to find a variety of benefits in the advanced functionality offered by a scalable, robust cloud ERP system.

Contact Business Solution Partners to learn how a cloud ERP implementation could help to improve your company’s efficiency and optimize workflows.