As companies grow, many organizations struggling with the limitations of QuickBooks and other off-the-shelf accounting systems find themselves asking: Is it time? QuickBooks is a simple accounting package, often perfectly suitable for businesses with basic accounting tasks as they’re establishing themselves. Once you realize the many limitations of this introductory software, it’s hard to imagine trying to make it all work together.
In today’s business climate you need access to multi-dimensional features from a single source of real-time and accurate data to make well-informed decisions. As you grow and operations become more complex, so too will you reach the point of asking the inevitable question: Is it time to swap out QuickBooks for Epicor ERP?
Scalability Limitations
Consider your projected growth over the next few years. When you’ve reached the point in which you need more than 30 user licenses or your staff can no longer use spreadsheets to keep track of inventory and sales orders, you quickly realize you need Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and not just accounting software.
What’s more, QuickBooks isn’t suited to manage multi-entity accounting. Requiring a separate QuickBooks system for each location necessitates logging in and out of the separate entities, extracting data from each requiring you to manually consolidate the data into spreadsheets.
Read: Growing Medical Equipment Manufacturer Continues to Scale with Epicor ERP
Reliance on Manual Processes
Spreadsheets are great for many functions, but becoming your default accounting solution is not one of them. Reliance on such manual processes often employed with QuickBooks creates a lack of reporting integrity. Quickbooks allows transaction information, like sales orders, to be edited at a later date. Aside from creating budgeting, management control, and visibility issues, you can potentially find yourself in legal or noncompliance trouble.
In addition, your company can’t afford the setbacks created by a select few having access to or knowing how to complete accounting functions. In the absence of those skilled workers, it can be difficult to retrace their information or complete their processes.
Human error is a major issue especially when multiple complicated spreadsheets make proofing your work or finding historical information extremely difficult. It can take hours or days to compile and analyze data needed for reporting purposes, at which time the data could be outdated, resulting in uninformed decision-making and wasted time.
Systems Integration Limitations
QuickBooks isn’t known for easily integrating data and processes with other applications. Using multiple, separate applications to complete basic accounting functions means multiple sources of data, making it less reliable, reducing your efficiency and weakening your security.
With so few applications known to integrate with QuickBooks, to get deeper business insights you may be turning to additional software packages for supply chain management, inventory tracking, batch invoicing and more. Eventually, each of these disjointed systems becomes an information silo where data has to be manually consolidated between each of the separate systems. This makes far more difficult to track while risking important data loss as information gets dispersed through the silos.
Financial Visibility Limitations
The straightforwardness of QuickBooks can be helpful to new businesses, but as your operations become more complex, so too does your responsibility to track multiple datasets to entirely realize your organization’s financial picture.
If you need to determine the number of units sold by a specific sales rep, to an indicated industry, for example, then you are ready for Epicor ERP. With QuickBooks, you aren’t able to compile data from multiple metrics, here again forcing you to incorporate manual workarounds and/or excessive spreadsheets for the business insights from these functions.//This contributes to limited financial visibility, which is another major problem experienced by businesses that have outgrown QuickBooks.
Ultimately, Epicor ERP saves time and money by virtually eliminating redundant data re-entry and excessive, error-prone manual entry. When your company requires a single source of information from an all-in-one solution to streamline business processes, you’re ready for Epicor ERP. If your business complexities are too complicated for QuickBooks and your operations are struggling as a result, Epicor can be integrated with CRM and other systems for improved forecasting, supply chain comparisons and compliance with taxes and regulations.
As a certified Epicor partner, e2b teknologies is a passionate and experienced team of industry leaders and business advisers providing high quality, uncomplicated, and innovative ERP solutions.
