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QuickBooks Alternative: How QuickBooks is Costing you Money

Written by RKL Team | Mar 1, 2017 6:00:00 PM

Finding a QuickBooks alternative is not easy. Avoiding change can be more costly than making the investment to change. There is an old adage that states that you’ll put up with the pain of doing something until it exceeds the pain of changing. For example, you might not move a heavy chair out of a walkway the first time you stub your toe on it, but by the tenth time that chair has become such a nuisance that you want to throw it out the window. The same goes for organizations and the tools they use to get business done. No matter how inefficient or ineffective a tool is, an organization will often hang on until the pain of sticking with the solution isn’t as great as the perceived pain of changing. Many times, after accepting the need for change, organizations will find that making the move wasn’t painful at all!

It’s true that change, especially at an organizational level, can be challenging. And although switching to a new financial accounting software isn’t as simple as pressing a button, upgrading to a more robust system can be well worth it - in more ways than one.

This is your wake up call when it comes to Quickbooks as a financial reporting tool for your business. Even though it’s easy to coast along, there’s a high price for sticking with this low-cost solution. Consider this notification that your pain threshold has been reached on using an inefficient and ineffective system.

Manual reporting is costing you hours each month - and hundreds each year

It’s no secret that many firms use Excel in tandem with QuickBooks in order to compensate for the lack of abilities. The reporting function is very limited, and that leaves a gap for those that use financial reports to make strategic decisions. QuickBooks can’t handle multi-entities, and it doesn’t have a feature that allows you to report across multiple databases. As a result, many firms will use Excel, opening up opportunities for errors. Not only is manual reporting with Excel time-consuming and costly, but each copy-paste operation is as potential error in the making. Each of the Excel cells that your team generates manually could be an error that gives an inaccurate snapshot of your organization's finances. Without accurate reporting, it’s impossible to make real-time decisions for your business. And that can mean lost revenue, and more.

What about ASC 606 and revenue recognition?

QuickBooks can’t handle multi-entities & doesn’t allow you to report across multiple databases. 

Using Quickbooks and Excel to manage your accounting requires a lot of manual work, and that’s not ideal for a growing company that needs to adapt to changes. For example, the updated ASC 606 rules for revenue recognition will make it even more difficult to keep up with the Quickbooks/Excel reporting combination for usage based billing, accounting or forecasting. During the transition to the new guidelines you will use dual reporting and have to record revenue and expenses under both sets of rules. The complexity of using Quickbooks/Excel will make this process laborious. The pain of staying with a current solution is going to grow greater.

Your pain threshold has been met. It’s time to make the move from Quickbooks, and the technology experts at RKL can help successfully manage the transition to Intacct.

Intacct is not only a best-in-class cloud accounting solution, but offers an out-of-the-box module that meets the new guidelines and requirements. It will save your organization time, which will be essential as the new guidelines and requirements come to the forefront in the next year. The transition won’t be as painful as you think.