Clear Signs Businesses and Their Accounting Partners Need to Move on from QuickBooks

Jason Glass, Senior Director, Partnership Development

October 29, 2019

As a starter system, QuickBooks(opens in new tab) is a logical and economical choice. It provides the basic functionality that companies need to get going, supports a chart of accounts and manages both accounts payable and receivable. But QuickBooks could also be holding businesses back from achieving their full potential. And not just QuickBooks customers, but the partners and independent accountants that support them. As companies start to grow, expand internationally, or encounter more complex financial reporting requirements, their dependency on the QuickBooks system can turn into a burden.

That’s because this general ledger system doesn’t manage inventory across multiple sales channels; provide insights into the products that companies have on hand at a given time; streamline their ordering processes; or manage the reams of data that these companies receive and generate on a daily basis. It can also fall short when it’s time to add a new business, analyze sales or manage complicated cash flow reporting. Indeed, QuickBooks can hold back a fast-growing business.

For independent accounting professionals and other businesses supporting the QuickBooks ecosystem, this means their fastest-growing, most successful clients are either seeing their growth slow, or walking out the door when they move to a different system. Unless, they support a more sophisticated system like NetSuite, these partners constantly need to replace successful clients with smaller, less established customers.

Though most customers probably recognize the shortfalls of QuickBooks and the need to innovate in order to keep pace, some may be reluctant to upgrade, replace, or enhance their business systems. Others aren’t convinced that they’ll be able to find a solution that can meet their needs in an affordable way, choosing to instead just “make do.” Unfortunately, those decisions can turn out even more costly in the long run.

Implementation partners and independent accounting professionals can often play a key role in helping a business to determine when the time is right to move on to a more sophisticated accounting system and what products might be right for them.

Here are five signs that it’s time for businesses to look beyond QuickBooks and implement a unified, cloud-based financial system:

  • They’re not sure what’s really happening across their businesses. When departments, management groups and teams can’t share information, tools, priorities and goals with one another, the siloed mentality kicks into gear and takes over. Companies can break out of this mindset by deploying a financial system that generates and shares insights and data in real-time across the entire enterprise.
  • Financial consolidation across systems takes ages. As they grow, businesses may find themselves dealing with a bewildering complexity of foreign currencies and languages(opens in new tab), accounting standards, taxation structures and reporting and compliance requirements that far outstrip the capabilities of the standalone accounting applications they'd traditionally used for financial consolidation. Cloud computing offers a scalable model for sophisticated financial consolidation in a fraction of the time, and without the substantial capital expenditure of a typical on-premise ERP system. And by automating key accounting processes, a cloud ERP solution minimizes the risk of error and delay of manual approaches to multiple charts of accounts. 
  • Adding new sales channels, product lines or revenue streams (domestically or internationally) is extremely difficult. As businesses mature and their market share increases, they will surely hit the outer limits of growth in their current markets. In order to implement the growth strategies and gain a competitive edge in the world market, they need an integrated business system that centralizes accounting, order management, customer relationship management (CRM) and ecommerce processes. When everyone has access to the same customer information and transactions, it's easier to respond quickly to customer inquiries. It allows salespeople to spot opportunities to cross-sell and upsell, and teams can confidently track pending orders, service issues or overdue invoices.
  • They’re using more Excel spreadsheets and third-party applications to connect data. These band-aid solutions don’t “talk” or share data with one another, which means more human intervention, manual data reentry, errors and steps in the financial management process. With a cloud financial management platform, your clients’ marketing, finance, sales and inventory managers can all pull the exact data they need to understand trends and improve the accuracy of their forecasting. Because they all draw from the same data source, these users will have a more holistic insight into customer behavior at each stage of the transaction, and without the need for spreadsheets or bolt-on applications.
  • They need better revenue recognition, allocations, planning & budgeting and/or better reporting insights. Financial reporting isn’t getting any easier, and it can be especially challenging for companies that are growing, expanding into new lines of business or exploring their global horizons.

If a business is dealing with any or all of these issues, it’s likely a sign that they’ve outgrown their current systems. A comprehensive cloud-based solution like NetSuite supports all aspects of a businesses by unifying financials, sales, project and product management, ordering, invoicing and revenue recognition on a single platform. It will also help your firm minimize complexity across a broad range of operations, allowing insights into the entire business based on a single, customizable platform.

QuickBooks partners that move to NetSuite can make 30-50% margin on new license sales plus high margins on renewals and service. In addition, they retain their fastest-growing clients while expanding their client base with other companies looking to migrate from QuickBooks.

Visit www.netsuite.com/quickbooks for more information on switching to NetSuite and reach out to the NetSuite Partner Recruitment team today to get the conversation started. Complete our contact form here(opens in new tab) or email SolutionProviders@netsuite.com to find out more.

Also learn more about adding NetSuite to your practice by reading our whitepaper, “Building Your Oracle NetSuite Practice: Reaching Beyond the Limitations of QuickBooks” and our datasheet “Helping Clients Think Beyond QuickBooks”. (opens in new tab)

NetSuite has packaged the experience gained from tens of thousands of worldwide deployments over two decades into a set of leading practices that pave a clear path to success and are proven to deliver rapid business value. With NetSuite, you go live in a predictable timeframe — smart, stepped implementations begin with sales and span the entire customer lifecycle, so there's continuity from sales to services to support.