You know it’s time to explore an alternative to QuickBooks when your finance team has an unhealthy dependence on spreadsheets to support financial processes and reporting. Manual data entry and re-entry take hours and cause errors. Lack of visibility into business metrics inhibits decision-making, and the system runs oh-so-slow. Despite the obvious drawbacks, the anxiety of exploring an alternative to QuickBooks and migrating to a cloud-based financial management system is all too real.
Similar to slipping on an old pair of jeans or favorite pair of shoes, using QuickBooks can become second nature to teams who have used it for a while. Unfortunately, this familiarity may keep them stuck in QuickBooks—even though problems like lack of real-time tracking and the constant need to perform manual consolidations indicate it’s time for a change. Workarounds in Excel may seem easier than switching to a completely new accounting platform.
As both your revenue and customer base grow, however, so do the complexities of your business, and the limitations of QuickBooks are magnified. So, what can your organization do to ensure a successful migration to a cloud financial management system, given all the anxieties and technical hurdles to overcome?
The challenges of moving data from QuickBooks
One of the most significant problems is moving data from QuickBooks to your new solution. Brute-force techniques, Excel formulas, and other manual processes are commonly used to supplement QuickBooks, creating a recipe for errors in data entry and categorization. Key items may be duplicated, incomplete, or incorrectly formatted. These inaccuracies can daunt even the most intrepid when attempting to transition to a cloud-based solution.
Thus, moving to a cloud financial management system might not produce the desired effects if your master data is corrupt and non-standardized before and after the migration. Dealing with the inconsistencies of such a QuickBooks ledger can be tough, requiring a well-thought-out process. The goal is to standardize data, thoroughly test it, and then ultimately integrate it with your new system.
Unfortunately, cloud financial vendors might not be able or willing to assist with data cleansing, i.e. the correction of mistakes and the overall standardization of your records. In addition, the solution itself may lack automatic cleanup functionality for data imported from QuickBooks. And doing it yourself can be a nightmare, with tons of manual data entry and time-consuming tasks better left to data-cleansing experts.
Get professional help from RKL eSolutions
A trusted implementation partner such as RKL eSolutions can ease your anxiety and help you plan out your migration, including what to do with your old QuickBooks data and how everything will be integrated. With RKL eSolutions on your side, you’ll more easily and fully enjoy the benefits of a QuickBooks alternative like Sage Intacct, the best-in-class cloud financial management system Contact us today to arrange a complimentary assessment.