11 Signs Your Business is Outgrowing QuickBooks (& What Comes Next)
You may have started out with QuickBooks as your entry-level accounting software. With its lower price point and relatively easy-to-use interface, the system is a popular choice for many businesses in their early days.
However, as your business grows, your financial management needs will evolve with it. You may have to start finding ways to bridge gaps in your QuickBooks solution with manual workarounds or other third-party applications. But eventually, as your business continues to expand, you’ll start facing limitations that hinder your ability to manage your accounting, bookkeeping, and finances.
Has your business outgrown QuickBooks? By keeping an eye out for a few telltale signs, you’ll be able to figure out when you’re ready to move onto the next evolution of accounting and inventory tracking software—an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system—that helps your organization grow.
12 Signs You’ve Outgrown QuickBooks
If you recognize one or more of the following signs, it’s an indication that QuickBooks is holding your business back from new markets, new opportunities, and new growth—and that it’s time to find a new solution.
1. Manual Processes Are Time-Consuming, Error-Prone, & Labor-Intensive
You’ve added manual processes as a workaround with QuickBooks, from monthly close to data entry and analysis. These manual processes are not only labor-intensive but also prone to error. And with your accounting team spending their time searching for and manually entering data into QuickBooks, they can’t focus on high-level analysis and value-added work.
While automation can take care of a wide range of repetitive manual tasks, you need a system that doesn’t rely on manual processes and instead supports automation so it can grow as you grow.
2. You’re Using Too Many Spreadsheets
QuickBooks limits access of users and a defined amount of storage space. To make sure your team can access vital company data as needed, you likely store it across various spreadsheets as a workaround. Of course, that means your employees have to spend time hunting for the right data (and hoping it’s the most recent and accurate version of that data). And spreadsheets are at risk of fraud and corruption—not to mention how easy it is to make an error when entering or updating data in spreadsheet format.
A more robust, comprehensive system would eliminate the need for so many disconnected and vulnerable spreadsheets and set your business up with a more streamlined process that will allow your business to operate more efficiently.
3. Data & Processes Are Spread Across Disparate Tools & Systems
When businesses reach the fringes of QuickBooks’s capabilities, many turn to third-party solutions or add-on applications to fill in the gaps. If you’ve invested in additional tools and systems to expand your QuickBooks setup, you may have found that these systems often introduce their own perils, such as data synchronization errors or limits in functionality. But the real concern is that your data and processes are now spread across disparate tools and systems. It can turn into a mess very quickly.
Best practice is to leverage one integrated platform that is a single source of truth for all your company data.
4. You’ve Hit User & Database Storage Limits
QuickBooks has strict limits on the number of user licenses and the amount of storage space available for your subscription. If you exceed those limits, you’ll have to deal with system outages, additional costs, and other issues that may arise.
When you’re in growth mode, the last thing you want to deal with is whether your financial software can handle adding another user or data entry. You’ll need a system that is designed to grow and scale with your operations.
5. You Can’t Customize the System to Meet Your Needs
In the best-case scenario, you can customize your financial system to meet all the unique needs of your business, right? Well, the data structure and limited functionality of QuickBooks makes it extremely difficult (and often impossible) for you to make the configurations you need to create your dream software. Your best hope is to find third-party applications or create workarounds that make up for the system’s lack of flexibility and customizability.
Of course, another option is to implement a system that is fully configurable and designed to work for growing business like yours.
6. You Need Real-Time Visibility
With all your data and processes spread out across QuickBooks, various spreadsheets, and third-party tools, you can’t get real-time visibility into your business operations. Your only option is to gather data and insights from those disparate systems, which is not only labor intensive but also error prone. And depending on how you run your data may give you different answers to the questions at hand.
The ideal system keeps data up-to-date and provides real-time visibility and insights across all aspects of your everyday business operations. Making the switch to a more robust system can streamline your processes so that you get the answers to the critical questions at hand with the data.
7. Forecasting, Budgeting, & Reporting Are Lackluster
With QuickBooks, reporting is limited to standard data grouping, which severely restricts how your data can be seen, used, analyzed, visualized, and communicated. You can’t consolidate specified statistical information or customize complex datasets. You’re also restricted to 12 fiscal periods—there’s no ability to define custom reporting periods. Additionally, finding and extracting insights from historical information is difficult, often turning forecasting, budgeting, and reporting into guesswork.
To gain the reporting flexibility you’ll want (and need!) as your business grows, you’ll want to have a solution that is flexible and provides interactive dashboards as well as business insights at-a-glance.
8. Preparing for Audits Is Expensive & Burdensome
With QuickBooks, the ease of use is a good thing. However, the lack of auditability attached to users (any user) making a transactional change can become a real problem down the line. Without historical context, identifying and fixing errors can be nearly impossible, which is an organizational—and legal—disaster in a highly regulated business. And preparing for audits is expensive and burdensome, with your accounting team having to rely on spreadsheets to meet evolving regulatory and compliance standards.
You’ll need an application with accessible audit trails throughout, a trailing history that cannot be deleted, and a single source of data truth to make audits less of a headache.
9. You Can’t Scale & Migrate Data as You Grow
With QuickBooks, importing or exporting data becomes a piecemeal process that can be messy, error-prone, and time-consuming.
A better choice is to use a system that is designed with integration in mind. You want financial software that can access and share data as well as communicate with other applications seamlessly and frictionlessly. Scalability is key.
10. Your Inability to Access Software on the Go is Creating Problems
We live in a mobile, multi-device, multi-networked world, but you won’t get that with QuickBooks alone. QuickBooks’s on-premises or local area network access is going to put you behind what your competitors can do, and its mobile features are limited. With your data in spreadsheets and stuck in third-party applications, remote accessibility is a problem.
You deserve software that empowers your organization to do business anywhere, at any time, from any device. You’ll want relevant data to be easily accessible when and where you need it.
11. You’re Not Seeing a Positive ROI
A common problem with basic, single purpose solutions such as QuickBooks is that the add-ons add up. And we’re talking big time, especially once you add in the annual upgrades, custom workarounds to fix limitations, and the technology required to integrate these systems.
Your best bet is to find a platform that works as one great interfaced solution that can do it all to support your business as it grows.
A Cloud-Based ERP System: The Next Step Up from QuickBooks
Your business shouldn’t be restrained by a system that limits what you can collect, store, process, link, and catalog. And to ensure your customers, suppliers, partners, and users around the world are supported, you shouldn’t have to limit business growth to one country’s borders.
Don’t let QuickBooks hold you back. It’s time to find a more powerful, robust, scalable, and customizable option that serves your business—now and in the future.
With a comprehensive ERP system, you can ditch manual processes for automation, inaccessibility for convenience, disparate systems for a centralized source of data, and rigidness for flexibility. Transitioning to an ERP allows your business to streamline processes, integrate with other systems, and maintain efficiency as you grow.
And if you’re worried that an ERP platform is too big for your business, don’t be. Today’s ERP systems make it easy to start small, with exactly the functionality and modules you need, and add on as you grow.
If your business has outgrown QuickBooks, the next step is to implement a cloud-based ERP system.
Streamline & Automate Business Processes with an ERP System from CAI Software
At CAI, we create innovative, production-oriented software to help our customers across a variety of industries streamline business processes and optimize their manufacturing, processing, or distribution environment. Our goal is to provide you with industry-leading solutions that improve your daily business operations, all with excellent service and support.
Whether you are looking to automate production, increase your return on investment, reduce costs, or streamline operations, we can help. With our suite of ERP systems and access to our expert team, optimizing your business processes is easier than ever.
Contact us today for a free consultation.