QuickBooks

Article Dean Dorton

For many small and mid-sized businesses, Intuit QuickBooks is usually the first choice for financial software in the organization’s early days – and for good reasons. QuickBooks is well-known and very easy to use, and it offers the basic functionality that almost any business can use to get off the ground.

Unfortunately, growing businesses soon realize that the early value of the management software is soon overtaken by its limitations.

Top 5 Limitations of QuickBooks

1. Over-Reliance of Spreadsheets to Support Financial Processes and Reporting

“After spending over one week sifting through massive spreadsheets, we discovered that we have a calculation error in how we had been recognizing revenue for the past three years.”

Sound familiar? Hopefully not – but many organizations naturally and gradually develop sophisticated accounting requirements (such as revenue recognition and multi-entity consolidation). And if QuickBooks is the financial foundation, that often means cumbersome workarounds because QuickBooks doesn’t provide the built-in capabilities for these complex processes.

  • Are you exporting data to multiple spreadsheets?
  • Are you creating additional journal entries each month?
  • Have you created home-grown applications for recording revenue or expenses outside of QuickBooks?

These workarounds lead to entry errors, incorrect or outdated data, process inefficiencies, wasted time and resources, and a lack of control and compliance.

2. Excess Manual Data Entry and Re-Entry

“How do I import customer order data into QuickBooks? I currently spend many hours manually creating invoices in QuickBooks, and there should be a better way.”

Most companies don’t integrate QuickBooks with other key business applications, opting instead to just manually integrate the systems (think: flat files, CSV dumps, and rekeying). That might suffice when volumes are small. But ask anyone who’s endured these workarounds and you’ll see it’s a real productivity killer as the business grows. Who has time to manually research, re-enter, and verify data that’s already captured elsewhere? Instead of automating your business, these manual integrations are invitations to errors and wasted time.

3. Limited Access to Reports and Information to Drive Decision-Making

“Rather than constantly struggling to keep up with incoming requests for data and specific reports, Sage Intacct lets us consistently report financials in a timely manner and feel confident that we can easily respond to any new request.”

Real-time visibility into business metrics is essential for timely decisions that boost performance. QuickBooks offers canned reports – and no dashboards – so your visibility is limited and you’re often forced to make decisions based on outdated data. By leveraging a financial system that incorporates both a multi-dimensional general ledger and report writer, you can transform your analysis and become a strategic partner who generates insights that answer the bigger questions facing management.

4. Difficulty in Adapting to New Business Requirements

“QuickBooks continues to crash, and I lose all our payroll data. I don’t have time to re-enter data for 350 hourly employees…”

Maybe you’ve seen a couple of the classic signs that you’ve outgrown QuickBooks. Those menus and screens – that used to be so quick and responsive – now have lengthy delays as the system struggles to keep up with data volume and calculations intensity. Report-printing takes forever. And queries seem to dim the lights.

This critical limitation is risky at best. It can force you to periodically shut down QuickBooks – just to maintain data files. In a worst-case scenario, you’re looking at potentially disastrous results: system crashes and the loss of crucial data. That’s no way to run a business.

5. Inadequate Controls Around Financial Processes

“Errors caused by manual processes and a lack of control resulted in $180,000 of improper expense reimbursements within a six-month period.”

Manual process is a fact of life with QuickBooks. Unfortunately, they increase the probability of data duplication and data entry errors, making it difficult to gain an integrated, real-time financial view of a company’s end-to-end operations.

Despite its popularity as a business application for small business, QuickBooks simply wasn’t designed for growing organizations that need advanced functionality for manage sophisticated processes.

The Next Wave of Financial Management Technology – Moving Past QuickBooks

Dean Dorton has helped many businesses make the move from QuickBooks to Sage Intacct. The accounting features on this product are simple and easy to use.

These companies now enjoy real-time data and processes, flexible reporting, and role-based dashboards. We’ve helped organizations increase productivity through accounting automation, extensive integration and user-defined workflows. And, these companies can scale with Sage Intacct – as the business grows they can increase transaction volume and easily add new entities.

Give us a call or shoot us an email if you’d like to explore Sage Intacct as your future financial accounting solution. If you’d like to see the software – join us for a quick daily demo.

Daily Demo

Philip Massey, CPA
Software Consulting Director
pmassey@ddaftech.com • 919.508.6062

Article Dean Dorton

Join Dean Dorton to learn about Sage Intacct’s cloud-based accounting platform and how some of its cash management functionalities work in comparison to QuickBooks. Stop living in a world where most of your cash management happens outside the accounting system, but rather inside the system using workflows, automation, and superior reporting capabilities.

Anyone who plays a financial management role in their organization including (but not limited to):

  • Current QuickBooks users
  • CFOs/COOs/Controllers
  • VPs and Directors of Finance
  • Accountants, Bookkeepers, Office Managers
  • Presidents, Executive Directors

Resources:

Article Dean Dorton

We all strive for perfection, especially when it comes to our financials. Outdated and on-premises systems that at one time were lifesavers are now growing liabilities for today’s modern businesses.

Outdated reporting systems can wreak havoc on your data accuracy, productivity, and your team’s sanity.

The Horror is Real

We hear about accounting teams spending countless hours on Excel spreadsheets. One company had to compile and work from a master Excel spreadsheet with no less than 56 tabs – one for each entity, spanning 3 alphabets wide.

We’ve seen productivity bottleneck to a halt as one company struggled to manage 300 financial statements per month.

The nightmares of cascading errors threading through a company’s data are very real.

They happen all the time and are almost always due to manual entry and re-entry on Excel spreadsheets, most often relied upon by companies managing their financials with on-premises systems.

While on-premises systems may work in theory, in practice they can cause productivity, accuracy, and data integrity breakdown:

  • Data on spreadsheets are prone to errors from heavy manual sorting, and data entry.  This kind of reporting only offers one snapshot in time. Reporting that relies heavily on Excel spreadsheets does not have the accuracy and real-time visibility of reporting done in the cloud.
  • Multi-entity companies require workarounds to manage all of the data between them, forcing accounting departments to spend endless hours clicking between entities, managing their transactions, then performing global consolidations manually each month.
  • Productivity grinds to a halt when your teams need to navigate tedious workarounds and endless checking and double-checking, wondering at night if they made a mistake.

Don’t let these horror stories happen to you…

Write Your Own Ending

Sage Intacct, a best-in-class cloud-based financial management solution streamlines, integrates and customizes your accounting processes for greater speed, accuracy, and productivity.

  • According to a recent case study on one Sage Intacct customer, Tandem HR, they saved 500 labor hours by eliminating their reporting workarounds.
  • Because it integrates with other popular solutions, like Nexonia, HRPyramid, and SalesForce, Sage Intacct significantly reduces manual entry and increases data accuracy.
  • Teams can use customizable reporting features to create and send current-to-the-minute data with deep drill-down capability to the source transaction, and options to add notes on journal entries for faster closings and cleaner audits.
  • Sage Intacct’s unique chart of accounts tagging system means faster organizing in the GL, and less manual entries.
  • One-click consolidations. Skip tedious manual consolidations, regardless of how many entities your company has.

If your company is still relying on Excel and manual entries for reporting, don’t wait until you encounter a data disaster. Re-write your story now! We can help you find the right solution to make your financials work for you.

You’ll gain a clear understanding of:

  • The risks and limitations of spreadsheets within financial processes
  • How cloud ERP software accelerates the monthly close, improves time and expense management, and automates revenue recognition processes including preparation for the transition to ASC 606
  • Practical steps organizations can take to eliminate spreadsheets and operate more efficiently

Good Riddance to Spreadsheets

Download our free whitepaper “Eliminating the Cost of Spreadsheet Errors”

get the whitepaper

Article Dean Dorton

Change is inevitable as your company expands, and if you’re still using Quickbooks for your financials, it might be time to ask yourself whether it’s still the best fit for navigating growth’s tricky course. Here are 5 signs that your company is treading water with outdated systems and processes.

1. You’re having trouble remembering when you last updated your systems.

If you’re using outdated software that has since released new versions, or sticking with an older system because it’s what you know, you may be doing your business more harm than good. Running your financials on outdated software sets your business up for system reliability and data accuracy risks.

2. Your systems don’t integrate.

If Quickbooks isn’t integrating with the other software solutions you use, your teams are doing more work than they need to, while also risking data accuracy. Re-keying data into your other systems invites data errors. Relying on spreadsheets for critical reporting also invites data errors and consumes your team’s time. Trudging through tedious workarounds slows productivity too. These are all unnecessary risks your company can avoid with integration-based automation.

3. You can’t track your business like you once could.

The data you’ve always worked with in the past may not be the data you need now. Fast-growing businesses also have fast-changing metrics. However, on-premises systems can’t produce inventories, marketing conditions, or location and entity performance metrics with the speed or accuracy the way a cloud-based solution can.

4. Growth and compliance demands seem harder and harder to meet.

Modern businesses – especially subscription-based businesses, need to meet modern customer demands. With the increasingly complex product or subscription models come more complicated customer tracking and revenue recognition that meets the new ASC 606 and IFRS 15 compliance requirements. Outdated on-premises Quickbooks versions just can’t meet those demands without headaches, costly software retrofits, or less-than-perfect workarounds.

5. Your financial processes aren’t adequately scaling to your company’s financial needs.

It’s only a matter of time until your growing company needs something from your Quickbooks software that on-premises software just can’t do. Growing companies – especially fast-growing companies need to work in the cloud for growth tasks like adding new entities, or locations, quickly performing global consolidations, or converting multiple currencies.

A cloud-based financial management system like Sage Intacct supports today’s growing businesses:

  • Automatic, behind-the-scenes updates and maintenance happen for reliability and performance confidence.
  • Seamless integration with other best-in-class cloud-based solutions ensures data accuracy, and team collaboration to give fast answers to potential and existing customers, and to streamline accounting processes and project management.
  • Real-time 24/7 updated visibility into key metrics and reporting on your personal dashboard means no waiting or guesswork when it comes strategic data analysis.
  • ASC 606 and IFRS 15 compliant software makes revenue allocations for contracts faster, easier and more automated.
  • Growth-focused features speed new entity set-up, GL entries, currency conversions, and global consolidations.
View our free on-demand webinar “You’ve Outgrown QuickBooks, How Do You Make the Switch?” to learn how Peter Nesbitt, Director of Finance at Bit.ly, the category leader in link management, managed their spectacular growth by moving from QuickBooks to Sage Intacct.
Think You’ve Outgrown QuickBooks?
View our free on-demand webinar “You’ve Outgrown QuickBooks, How Do You Make the Switch?” to learn how Peter Nesbitt, Director of Finance at Bit.ly, the category leader in link management, managed their spectacular growth by moving from QuickBooks to Sage Intacct.

Article Dean Dorton

There’s no doubt, QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online are massively popular accounting solutions for solopreneurs and small businesses. The solutions are inexpensive and easy to navigate – almost all businesses started with QuickBooks.

One clue that your company has outgrown QuickBooks is an ever-increasing number of spreadsheets necessary to manage the business.
Spreadsheets to assist in ad-hoc reporting.  Spreadsheet to track customer subscriptions.  Spreadsheets to track revenue recognition.  You get the picture.

This multiple spreadsheet workaround is both burdensome and prone to human error. What results is a slowing of business operations: your top staff becomes bogged down in manual oversight tasks instead of focusing on value-added projects that promote growth.

So, if you’d like to free yourself from spreadsheets and other manual processes and focus on business viability and growth and profitability, here’s why Sage Intacct makes sense:

1) It’s automated and accurate, promoting transparency and effective decision-making.
2) It can be used by any type of business, from start-ups and small business to large enterprises.
3) QuickBooks Online may let you create and manage custom invoices, but Sage Intacct includes more robust features: it allows you to centralize accounts payable/receivable, facilitates multi-currency management and multi-entity consolidations, and (through its general ledger system) captures real-time business performance through dimension values.
4) If you have multiple entities, Sage Intacct lets you oversee them in one location. With Sage Intacct’s Root and Entity accounting system, you can set up each entity according to its unique features, e.g, different currencies for different entities.
5) Sage Intacct lets you control user access to sensitive business data. For example, employees can be provided self-service access to the sales order page but be blocked from the reports or purchasing pages. Managers can also call up departmental reports without being given access to the entire company’s financial data.
6) While both Quickbooks Online and Sage Intacct provide dashboards, Sage Intacct’s can be customized according to user preferences or roles. With Sage Intacct, you can use either pre-determined components from the list or create your own performance cards, graphs, and bar charts. To date, QuickBooks Online does not yet have this flexibility.

According to Finances Online, Sage Intacct is one of the top 10 alternatives to QuickBooks, with a reported score of 9.8 and 99% customer satisfaction. Sage Intacct offers definite advantages over QuickBooks Online, FinancialForce Accounting, and NetSuite.

Sage Intacct is a best-of-breed, cloud-based, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution for SMBs and large enterprises, rather than a one-size-fits-all software suite such as NetSuite. Unlike QuickBooks Online, Sage Intacct is also 100% GAAP-compliant.

Sage Intacct’s dashboards and reports are fully customizable and perfect for multi-currency management, inter-entity consolidations, and access control management. Sage Intacct links seamlessly to Salesforce via an effortless point-and-click CRM integration process seamlessly links to Salesforce, even for companies without prior familiarity with the latter. Essentially, Sage Intacct facilitates seamless scalability and is an extremely popular step up from QuickBooks Online.

The Benefits Of Sage Intacct

In 2017, six award-winning companies leveraged Sage Intacct to decrease close times by 60%, achieved an astonishing combined 410% ROI, and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in reduced staffing needs. These companies were (in no particular order) Meals on Wheels America, Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, Legacy Healthcare Services, DFO, Publisher Circulation Fulfillment, and Workiva.

With Sage Intacct, DFO found that it could consolidate 80+ entities in minutes rather than days/weeks. The cloud-based solution also decreased DFO’s invoice processing costs by more than $250 per invoice. Meanwhile, Meals on Wheels America shortened their end-of-month close times by 33% and reaped increasing revenues with only a 25% increase in staffing.

Workiva (with its powerful enterprise management and reporting/compliance SaaS platform) reportedly gained $500k in value by utilizing Sage Intacct’s robust quote-to-cash process. The verdict is clear: with Sage Intacct, your business will reap the rewards of flawless scalability and agility.

For further help in evaluating how Sage Intacct can benefit your business, contact us. Whether you’re interested in how automation increases staff productivity or how Sage Intacct’s faster cash cycles can boost your business operations, we’re here to answer your questions. At Massey Consulting, we’re focused on solutions that work for you.

Article Dean Dorton

7 Reasons to Give QuickBooks the Boot
In the past, using QuickBooks for your financials was probably a worthwhile solution. So many businesses look to it when they’re starting out, but now that your business has grown, and become more complicated, the software that once was a solution has become a problem. The software hasn’t changed, you have – and it may be time to look for better fitting options.

  1. Your Systems Don’t Sync

When you’re working with financial data that demands details from your other software applications, the fact that Quickbooks doesn’t sync with those applications can create big problems. Entering and re-entering the same data to migrate information, or using Excel to support isolated applications means a delay in reporting, and is time-consuming and precarious. Duplicate data entry creates potential for small inconsistencies to create larger, unforeseen errors down the line.

  1. Spreadsheets

No one really likes them, but everyone needs them. They serve a purpose to a limited degree, but chances are, if you’re using Quickbooks, you’re probably depending on them to pick up the slack. If you find your financial backbone relies heavily on spreadsheets and their fragile formulas to support Quickbooks, your financials are vulnerable to data breakdown with just one entry error.

  1. Limited Access

Quickbooks-run businesses that have remote teams, more than one office, multiple entities, multiple currencies, or frequent travelers suffer the most from having limited access to their financials. These types of companies see a big disconnect between satellite offices and the one that runs their financials, so when someone remote desperately needs access to live financial data to manage and leverage new and existing business, the data just isn’t there as it needs to be.

  1. Separate Entities with Separate Accounts

Logging in and logging out doesn’t sound like such a big deal, unless you’re doing it all day long to manage hundreds of transactions. When your accounting department is managing multiple accounts in Quickbooks to enter multi-entity data, data accuracy erodes, productivity takes a nosedive, and the margin for error grows exponentially. One false entry and your data is subject to that error cascading throughout the system, leaving an undetected mess in its wake.

  1. Too Much Transparency

Not every detail in Quickbooks is meant for all to see. When certain data is left exposed to the hands of everyone in the company, errors can happen, unauthorized people can make unauthorized decisions, and sensitive data can become compromised.  Businesses that don’t have the customization options to protect sensitive customer and company data open the door to security issues, data protection risks, and missteps in accounting procedures.

  1. Rigid Reporting Options

As companies expand, their financial reporting complexities grow right alongside the success. Using Quickbooks for complex reporting often means having to regularly craft workarounds to arrive at the reporting answers in the dimensions you require. That takes time, effort and countless hours that could be spent on managing your growth.

  1. It’s Not the Cloud

Complex businesses that use Quickbooks’ static, on-premises software are working with great limitations. When those companies bring in a best-in-class solution like Intacct, those limitations fall away to make room for more robust financials.  Cloud accounting means a better fit for a growing company.

  • Secure data shows up everywhere it needs to go, in real-time, for faster reporting, and increased productivity.
  • Transactions populate across entities with complete automation.
  • Global consolidation happens in one click, with up-to-date adjustments and conversions of multiple currencies, for multiple entities.
  • Comprehensive financials eliminate the need rely on spreadsheets for calculations and amortizations.
  • Flexible integration with your other software solutions eliminate the need for duplicate entry.
  • Expert-designed migration tools make transitioning to the cloud a smooth, secure, organized process.

Stop working to fit your software, and start making your software fit you. Contact us today to find out more about how Intacct can relieve some of the growing pains of success, and bring more efficiency and accuracy back to your financial reporting.