QuickBooks at a Glance
The popular entry-level accounting software, QuickBooks, helps small and medium-sized businesses execute basic accounting and financial management tasks like generating invoices, tracking expenses, managing payroll, and receiving payments. Even without an accounting background, QuickBooks offers ease of use and different plans to fit a variety of budgets and requirements with increased functionality available while the business experiences growth.
However, organizations like yours may begin to encounter growing pains as this begins to occur and need a holistic solution with deeper functionality, more sophisticated reporting, and capabilities to streamline complex business processes.
Signs You've Outgrown Your QuickBooks Solution
Disparate Tools & Data: You need to expand your capabilities to accomplish your day-to-day tasks more efficiently and are looking to add a third-party application to extend QuickBooks’s functionality beyond accounting. For example, you would like to add an inventory system. You quickly realize that with QuickBooks, integration is not possible and configuration issues will disconnect your data across the different systems. Additionally, dependence on a third-party app increases the cost of the overall solution, requires additional maintenance and training, and further complicates business processes.
Manual Processes & Spreadsheets: You are using the basic reporting and generic insights available through QuickBooks, but you need better information to make data-driven decisions. You are spending countless hours consolidating, importing, and exporting data between systems and correcting data entry errors instead of on valuable analysis and practical activities to grow the business. We call these manual analytics and refers to the time-consuming process of downloading, copying, and pasting data into Excel, performing complex calculations, manually merging data from multiple systems, and finally formatting the data into reports used to assess business performance.
Security Concerns: As your organization grows, more individuals have access to critical data. You realize that QuickBooks’s weak user permissions can limit some users or provide too much access to others. Their easy setup also means fewer accounting and audit controls as the system fails to keep a consistent audit trail of changes to master records or user logins. Combining this lack of controls with the fact that some activities are being done outside the system in spreadsheets or other avenues, you may be setting yourself up for an issue with regulatory compliance.
Multiple Entities: You find yourself needing centralized data between business units, subsidiaries, divisions, or brands. QuickBooks is excellent for smaller businesses but once a company grows to include new products/services, more employees, additional companies, etc., it is unable to handle the complexities of additional business processes.
Lack of Real-Time Information: As your organization grows to include more customers, products, revenue, and sales channels, you are frustrated at being unable to make informed, data-driven decisions. Disparate tools, manual processes, and multiple entries make closing your books at the end of each month a lengthy task. You know you need a solution that eliminates manual analytics and increases your reporting capabilities efficiently, while not compromising accuracy.
What To Do When You've Outgrown QuickBooks
If any of these challenges sound familiar, the good news is that outgrowing QuickBooks is a sign of success for your business, and you are ready for the next step in your journey of growth. Oftentimes companies that have outgrown their QuickBooks solution make the transition to a full-scale Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Business Central).
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central at a Glance
Much more than just accounting and financial management, Business Central allows organizations to connect sales, services, finance, and operations and manage their entire business from one comprehensive cloud-based platform that offers:
- Functionality across financial, supply chain, human resource, customer relationship, and project management
- A custom solution that will grow with your business to handle business processes such as inventory management, project management, reporting, and forecasting. It is easily scalable and can be customized to serve any unique business or industry requirements.
- Advanced reporting and analytics based on data consolidated from across the enterprise. Business Central with embedded Power BI (Business Intelligence) has the flexibility for advanced custom reporting with dashboards and real-time data visualizations.
- Superior security and audit trails with control over user access to information and functions and historical log that tracks changes made to data
- Advanced integration with other Dynamics 365 or Microsoft/Office 365 solutions or other easy third-party integrations via AppSource. Now you can connect workflows across accounting, sales, purchasing, inventory, and distribution; users can automate the business operations for a streamlined process.
- Third-party integrations through AppSource are built on a common data model, so businesses are not dealing with compatibility issues, complex configurations, or middleware when non-standard features are needed.
- Increased security with the ability to select more granular options and limit functions by permission, groups, dimensions, or accounts. For additional security, organizations can also enable built-in workflows. BC also offers a robust audit trail that tracks changes made to data with a historical log of activities, protecting against errors and employee mismanagement.
Let's Start a Conversation
Microsoft’s cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for small to mid-sized businesses to automate and streamline business processes, Business Central is designed to adapt to a growing company and give organizations the flexibility to customize the application to fit their current business needs.
If you are ready to integrate your financials with the rest of your business and streamline processes, reach out to our team to learn more about our QuickBooks to Business Central migration process and services.
Not sure if Microsoft Dynamics 365 BC is the right ERP for your business? Contact us today to schedule a call so we can explore your business’s ERP requirements.
If you're interested in learning more about the benefits, challenges, and costs of an ERP solution, visit our Business Applications page to continue your research or reach out to us by filling out our contact form to talk with us in person.
