Outgrowing QuickBooks: Lack of Integration
Businesses that are outgrowing QuickBooks often end up using a variety of applications to complete their accounting tasks, resulting in inefficiencies and information silos. QuickBooks works well as a basic financial solution for small businesses with simple accounting needs; however, as businesses grow they tend to begin adding separate tools to augment this basic functionality. After a while, this can add up to big problems with accounting processes that require manually transferring data between many applications.
Do any of these issues sound familiar?
You’ve Got Too Many Tools
The market is full of wonderful applications to streamline processes such as expense reporting, tax compliance, accounts payable, budgeting, and so much more. With so many options, you’re guaranteed to find solutions that can help your accounting stay on track. It’s nice to have all those applications and tools, but it is possible to have too many – especially when it comes to accounting. QuickBooks has relatively limited functionality, which encourages users to look elsewhere for business solutions.
In the end, though, using all these different applications can cause serious issues for your organization’s accounting. QuickBooks has a relatively limited set of integrations, and many of those integrations that do exist are not exactly seamless. If you choose to use applications that don’t integrate well with QuickBooks, you end up with a bunch of information silos – data has to be manually consolidated from one solution to the other. These manual processes end up wasting time, allowing for errors in data entry, and reducing your overall system security.
Information Silos
The lack of integration with QuickBooks also increases your risk of losing important data because everything is dispersed through various information silos. You may remember to transfer data that’s absolutely critical, but it can be easy to forget or ignore other metrics that might be helpful. For example, you might transfer basic customer information from your CRM solution to QuickBooks, but not consolidate details such as the number of people the client employs. Later, when you want to analyze your financials based on how much revenue was generated from businesses of a particular size, you’ll have to manually transfer that information from your CRM to your report before you can sort the data based on that metric. This contributes to limited financial visibility, which is another major problem experienced by businesses that have outgrown QuickBooks.
In summary, the limited functionality of QuickBooks encourages the use of additional business tools, but in the end this can cause even more headaches for your accounting. All of this leads to wasted time, increased errors, frustration, and higher risk of fraud.
More robust accounting solutions, on the other hand, provide a wider range of functionality and more automation so you don’t need to use many different applications in your daily routine. If you do still need to use additional tools, these accounting solutions allow you to integrate more effectively with a much wider array of other solutions.
Interested in learning more? Download the ebook, Life After QuickBooks to dive deeper into these issues and determine if your business is outgrowing QuickBooks.
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