5 Signs QuickBooks Enterprise Is Holding You Back

Happy New Year! It’s the ideal time to make new resolutions and set new goals. The start of 2018 is also an excellent opportunity to see if you’ve outgrown your accounting system. As you move forward into the new year, you may find that the system you relied on to manage finances and operations has gradually become a barrier to growth and efficiency. In a highly competitive business climate, you can’t afford spiraling overhead costs, functional limitations, and unnecessary risks. Here are five signs that you need an alternative to QuickBooks Enterprise.

 1. Running old QuickBooks Enterprise release

Companies running QuickBooks or QuickBooks Enterprise find that upgrading is difficult, costly, and time-intensive. There’s “no easy way up” because they often lack the IT resources to upgrade related software, databases, and operating systems that are required for the upgrade. Additionally, they need to rewrite customizations and integrations. Thus, many companies forego the cumbersome upgrade process and “make-do” with the risks and inconveniences of outdated software. And even when they do upgrade, they find the updated accounting system still lacks key features, requiring them to continue with the workarounds.

2. Held back by disconnected systems and processes

The cost of integrating your on-premises financial management system with various applications and databases can be prohibitively high, forcing finance into the “million-spreadsheet march” for crucial tasks like enterprise consolidations and revenue recognition. And even if you do bite the bullet to fund your enterprise integration, you’re often trapped in a constant maintenance cycle, where every new software upgrade breaks your integration.

3. Can’t keep up with business expansion

Legacy accounting systems weren’t designed to support the fast growth and expansions that smart businesses are pursuing. They’re typically ill-suited to add entities quickly. If you’re acquiring business units, you may be trying to stitch together a consolidated view across entities that use different accounting systems. That leaves you unable to track costs of different lines of business or services projects. Soon, you’re hiring more people just to keep up with transaction volumes.

4. New business requirements and regulatory compliance are difficult obstacles

To keep up with customer demands and expectations, many businesses are experimenting with new revenue models and alternative business structures. One of the most important new developments is the subscription business model, which is increasingly popular across many industries from software to services. However, that’s placing new demands on finance, because the billing and revenue-recognition requirements for subscription businesses are more complex. Unfortunately, when your traditional, outdated accounting system was implemented, these new requirements and rules didn’t exist. Attempting to bolt on or retrofit support for these sweeping changes is either painful, expensive—or impossible—because your accounting system was never intended to do so.

5. You aren’t able to fully track your business

Business success depends on the ability to see what’s happening in all areas of your business, especially if your operations or market conditions are changing rapidly. This means more people in your organization need better reports—ideally presented in real-time dashboards that show key metrics and enable them to drill down for details. However, your legacy accounting system is likely still operating in batch-processing mode—slowly and with no real-time visibility—simply to deliver rigid financial reports. Even in the best case, you’re forced to rely on third-party reporting and analysis tools to get even basic answers. You’re unable to create new reports, ask new questions, or customize your old reports to reflect changing business needs.