It’s not always easy to know when you’ve outgrown an accounting system. It’s even harder to tell when you are a smaller company. You might have other problems that obscure the real reason for lack of productivity or accountability. There are many businesses that use Quickbooks because it is cheap and relatively easy to use. When your company is small this might feel like the most affordable option, but as your business grows you will eventually find that avoiding a more complex ERP Solution is costing you a lot more than you think.
Don’t let the volume of Quickbooks users lull you in to believing it’s the right solution in all cases. According to Statistics Canada only about 2% of businesses in Canada have more than 100 employees. As your business starts outgrowing Quickbooks (or any other of the shelf accounting system) you will start to experience these kinds issues:
Business Insights
Any accounting system must help you establish insights into your business. The health of your business is frequently determined by multiple facets of your financials. You know you’ve outgrown QuickBooks when you have to manually combine cross-department or multiple business unit’s financial reports to figure out cash flow, budget and forecasting projections, and profitability.
There comes a point when basic accounting software can’t provide the financial insight you need to support a growing business. Dynamics GP provides a complete solution for your business operations including financials, customer relationships, supply chain management, manufacturing, human resources, payroll (Canadian and US), and more without the complexity of traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.
Audit Trails
In the off the shelf solutions, you are unable to confidently comply with regulations for monitoring and securing your financial data – especially in the public or quasi-public sectors. This might be as simple as locking closed periods all the way through to knowing exactly which user changed which line item.
As your business grows it is also critically important to tighten internal controls. With Dynamics GP you can also provide each of your users with access to only the software features that pertain to their immediate job tasks and restrict access to the remainder of your data and functions. Dynamics GP will help you track data changes, as well as control them. With the introduction of forms requiring approvals for certain types of data changes or by creating alerts to notify managers with each occurrence, records maintain their integrity.
Manual Processes
Spreadsheets seem like a great idea when you first start using them. All that fresh data that’s easy to manipulate. It seems ideal until you go through a couple of reporting periods and your data starts to get stale, or worse, incorrect. In addition to providing less than perfect data, spreadsheets also generally involve entering the same data in two or more places. That is just a waste of time. Building accurate, scalable reports is just one way that Microsoft Dynamics can quickly remove some manual processes and lead to greater productivity for your business.
Integration with other systems is something that Microsoft Dynamics GP and related tools can simplify. While the tools might make it easier to integrate you will likely need expert advice on what can and should be automated. Choosing Briware Solutions as your business systems partner is a great way for you to maximize your Dynamics GP investment.
Multi-Currency Exposure
It is a global economy and even if all of your sales are in your home location you might be buying from abroad and in different currencies. As exchange rates fluctuate, you need to understand the impacts of these changes in order to understand the impact on your invoices and inventories. Instead of spending days trying to sort out your currency conversions have Dynamics GP do it for you in minutes or hours depending on the volume of transactions.
The ability to do business and report in multiple currencies greatly increases the ease with which your business can compete in the broader global market.
Scalability
You know you have outgrown Quickbooks when you sacrifice transaction history or master records to improve performance. Quickbooks is a small business accounting system and it doesn’t scale. You might be experiencing unacceptable delays in menus, reports, or navigation. Many companies using QuickBooks start to notice a decline in QuickBooks performance once the file size reaches 30MB or the total number of transactions exceeds 32,000.
Don’t let that the success of your business be limited by your accounting software. Dynamics GP will scale to meet your growing needs now and into the future.
You might not know exactly when is the right time to switch business management systems. You won’t really know until you discuss it with an expert. Here at Briware Solutions Inc. we’ve worked with a number of entry level and mid-market accounting and ERP systems. We can help you identify the weaknesses in what you doing today so that you can determine if it’s the right time to move up to Microsoft Dynamics GP.