Are You Suffering from QuickBooks Stress?

Transcription

1 Are You Suffering from QuickBooks Stress? Are You Suffering from QuickBooks Stress? All materials within are a copyright of the author and The Rand Group, LLC, 1

2 Disclaimer The information contained within this whitepaper is the opinion of the author and in no way represents the opinion of The Rand Group, LLC. The information contained within should not be taken as legal or binding, and should be referred to as an opinion piece by a subject-matter expert. All materials within are a copyright of the author and The Rand Group, LLC, 2014 respectively. Are You Suffering from QuickBooks Stress? All materials within are a copyright of the author and The Rand Group, LLC, 2

3 Are You Suffering from QuickBooks Stress? Symptoms include sleepless nights, a lack of confidence in your financials, fear of compliance issues and an excessive amount of paper cuts. To learn more, and see if your company is suffering QuickBooks Stress, take our simple test below: QuickBooks Stress Test For every symptom you re experiencing, give yourself 1 point Is your office growing a box farm is there more paper showing up than you can reasonably process? Do you have an acute case of ExcelMania with so many spreadsheets to manage, do you lie awake at night contemplating all the manual updates you have to make or worse, worrying about the ones you ve forgotten? Are you uncomfortable with your own financial statements you produced them, you re responsible for them, you know where the data came from, but do you have 100% confidence in the numbers? Is your ability to be compliant compromised be it customer, bank, supplier, government or some combination thereof, are you in risk of non-compliance? Can you accurately account for your inventory are you having trouble securing a bank loan or raising capital because you don t have an accurate GAAP compliant account of your inventory? Are you feeling unsupported when something goes wrong with your accounting system or if you have questions, is there someone to call? Is your growth being constrained growth has always been your goal but are you feeling constrained by functionality that doesn t expand to help manage complexity from different locations or entities? Your Score Are You Suffering from QuickBooks Stress? All materials within are a copyright of the author and The Rand Group, LLC, 3

4 My QuickBooks Stress Score is: If you scored more than 2 points, you re showing signs of QuickBooks Stress. If you scored more than 4 points, you re already suffering the consequences of QuickBooks Stress, and it s time to take action. QuickBooks Stress is a serious condition which can quickly go from a few sniffles to a full blown flu if not addressed. Don t worry; Rand Group has helped countless businesses heal from QuickBooks Stress through the use of more robust software solutions and better business management. And once you ve healed, you re immune! QuickBooks is a great starter system which offers a number of features for managing the financials of your growing small business. It handles a range of basic bookkeeping tasks, but once your business starts to grow in size and complexity you will face limitations. At first, you may work around these limitations and continue to manage using QuickBooks as your accounting platform, but eventually the risks become too high and the limitations too complex. Before your business faces the negative impacts of a solution that cannot scale to meet your growing business needs, you must consider whether it s time for a change. This WhitePaper highlights some of the major reasons you may be outgrowing QuickBooks, and offers insight into the risks you may be facing if you don t move from an accounting software package to a full enterprise resource planning platform for your growing business. Are You Suffering from QuickBooks Stress? All materials within are a copyright of the author and The Rand Group, LLC, 4

5 Are You Suffering from QuickBooks Stress? How QuickBooks Limits Growth Potential As a small business, you re unlikely to need functions such as inter-company consolidations, elimination accounts, allocations or compliance management. At first, a basic bookkeeping system does everything you need, and as your company changes you adapt to your old system. This common practice puts limits on your business, which can be unperceivable for a time as you slowly evolve. However, overtime, the risks multiply and become more significant, the business experiences a negative impact on cash flow & profitability, and that impacts growth. Most businesses that start with QuickBooks will later experience this growth related stress. As your business grows, it s constrained by your system and eventually, the growth is stunted or altogether stopped. Before you reach a level of discomfort that impacts your daily business and threatens you re cash flow & profitability, you need to consider a change. While there is QuickBooks Enterprise and QuickBooks Pro with an expanded feature set, they are still not a full scale enterprise resource planning platform. It s not that QuickBooks can t manage your growing business; it s that it can t do so efficiently. When you consider how many people and man-hours of manual processes are required to continue running on QuickBooks, you must consider the value. If all of those resources focused more on tasks which were strategic and generated revenue, instead of tasks which software replaced decades ago, how would that impact your competitive advantage? Every business has a QuickBooks threshold, and when growth is your goal, you should consider the following when contemplating yours: Multiple Entities: When you start dealing with multiple entities, QuickBooks becomes structurally challenged. It limits how you can consolidate and roll-up multiple accounts, which means as you grow and want to diversify your risk, take in advancements or do tax planning, your accounting solution might not support your needs. There isn t a useful workaround that can make QuickBooks do this, and you ll be stuck. Are You Suffering from QuickBooks Stress? All materials within are a copyright of the author and The Rand Group, LLC, 5

6 Financial Statements: At some point you will need to produce accurate financial statements, but a lack of integration between QuickBooks and your other systems means you re limited in your ability to comply. Your accounting department will first need to compile all the necessary information into a spreadsheet, and then manually enter the details into QuickBooks. The result is a statement that took far too long to produce and is likely wrought with human error. Engineer to Order: QuickBooks cannot handle an engineer to order environment, and that creates complications when trying to track parts and how they assemble into a Bill of Materials (BOM). You need subassemblies and project planning to make this work, and those running QuickBooks are left using a spreadsheet to manage this separately. Manual processes are not only time consuming, but the accuracy is highly questionable. Further, processes that rely heavily on paper cannot be automated and have limited accessibility. Complexity: QuickBooks was not designed for complex accounting processes. As soon as you need job costing, project accounting, engineer to order or other more involved processes, you have to manage them outside of your accounting system. It doesn t do structural accounting and cannot help you manage bank debt or compliance. That usually means more spreadsheets, manual processes and potential for error. If you re running a complex business without a solution designed to manage those complexities, you re not being as efficient, accurate and productive as you should be. Human Resources: QuickBooks offers no functionality for managing your human resources. Not only does it lack benefits functionality, but the payroll functions are lacking breadth and it doesn t integrate with an HR Management solution that means even more disparate spreadsheets and documents. Your central database of human resources of information should not be a pile of paperwork locked away in someone s office. Time Entry: QuickBooks doesn t support time entry very well which means using an outside system or yet more spreadsheets that still won t effectively integrate with your accounting, job cost or project system. This creates complications with billing, impacts accuracy and leads to lost hours and free work. If a client asks for a detailed report or you find yourself over on project time, compiling information in order to resolve the request or discrepancy can take more hours than the project itself. Are You Suffering from QuickBooks Stress? All materials within are a copyright of the author and The Rand Group, LLC, 6

7 Support: If you ve ever had an issue with your QuickBooks solution, you know that getting support is difficult. Chances are, you purchased the system out of the box, installed it yourself and don t have a company you can rely on to help you troubleshoot. Your team may know how to use the solution, but not what to do when it isn t working properly, or at all. Your business cannot afford to be paralyzed by a system that isn t functioning. Those are just some of the major limitations of a QuickBooks solution for businesses that are trying to grow, or that have already experienced growth beyond QuickBooks capabilities. How the Limitations of QuickBooks Impacts Business What do all of these limitations mean to your business? Let s look at some of the impacts of trying to run your business with QuickBooks when you ve crossed the threshold: ExcelMania: The limitations of QuickBooks means you have to keep data in disparate places, and more times than not that means excesses of Excel spreadsheets. There is nothing wrong with Excel, but it s an ineffective way to manage large quantities of data. Every change in your business requires updates to often multiple spreadsheets, and human error increases with each line of data that has to be manually entered. This not only puts your company at risk for delivering inaccurate information, it increases your human capital needs and reduces your overall productivity. Poor Decision Making: Making important business decisions hinges on the quality and accuracy of the information you have on hand. With QuickBooks, data output is limited, you cannot access real-time information that you need, and reports take a significant amount of time to produce. You re unable to see the whole picture, and that can lead to hasty or poor decisions. Compliance Deficiency: Often times, people are made aware of the limitations of their QuickBooks solution following a compelling event and that s compelling in the negative sense. When a business realizes they are at risk for non-compliance to vendors, banks, customers, government regulations or a combination, they are already suffering the realities of the solution s limitations; realities that most times cannot be undone. Once you ve realized you re at risk for non-compliance due to the limits of your QuickBooks solution, you have to spend time and resources looking for a resolution. Are You Suffering from QuickBooks Stress? All materials within are a copyright of the author and The Rand Group, LLC, 7

8 Disparate Data: QuickBooks does not allow you to manage all of your business and financials, which creates the need for multiple programs and files. From paper files which take up space, to multiple digital files which can only be found by their original creator, disparate data creates inefficiency and risk. Paper contracts cannot communicate with a spreadsheet and deliver accurate data to your QuickBooks solution; these processes are manual. That means you re not only creating countless opportunities for error and conflicting data, but also wasting resources. Inefficiency: The limitations of QuickBooks create a layer of inefficiency across your entire organization. An inability to find accurate information affects your employees and your customers. Relying on manual processing doubles, triples or quadruples the time it takes to do even simple tasks. Productivity is impacted, and that affects your bottom line. Cash flow &Profitability: Cash is king in a small business; your ability to grow is directly correlated to your ability to either generate cash or secure loans and equity. With all the time you spend seeking out accurate information, you could be driving your business forward. Quickbooks does not enable your business to grow because it limits your ability to see critical information and make decisions, deliver accurate financials, account for your inventory and ensure you remain compliant. When you consider all the ways in which your QuickBooks solution is negatively impacting your company, you start to realize the significance of that impact on your cash flow, and your bottom line. Crossing the Threshold QuickBooks was designed to manage small bookkeeping jobs for businesses without aggressive growth goals, and is often set-up only taking into account the state of your business on purchase day. Without planning or looking toward the future, many businesses implement QuickBooks in a way that makes the inherent limitations become more apparent as time goes on. As you reach the QuickBooks threshold, these limitations create increasing amounts of risk for your business and stunt or otherwise eliminate your potential to grow. Eventually, every business running on QuickBooks must make a choice between redoing QuickBooks to add extra functionality in an attempt to circumvent the limitations created by the initial set-up, and purchasing a more robust business management software solution that is better designed to handle the nuances of their ever changing business. The reality is, both options cost about the same, but only one will help you meet your business goals. Are You Suffering from QuickBooks Stress? All materials within are a copyright of the author and The Rand Group, LLC, 8

9 To optimize your success and limit your risks, you should seek out alternate management systems before you re suffering all the symptoms of QuickBooks Stress upgrading before you hit the wall is significantly better and far less painful than doing so under duress. Consider a New Solution The developments in business management technology have made Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems more widely accessible to businesses of all sizes. With the variety of options available for purchasing and consuming ERP from on-premise to in the cloud, businesses are not as limited by budget or small user counts as they used to be. By implementing an end-to-end business management solution, you get a more automated and accurate way to manage your day to day financials, while reaping the benefits of real-time information and effective planning. A single ERP system can replace several disparate systems and manual processes, reducing administrative overhead and creating a more collaborative and efficient operation. Are You Suffering from QuickBooks Stress? All materials within are a copyright of the author and The Rand Group, LLC, 9

10 About George Brown Accomplished and forward thinking, George Brown is Senior Vice President at Rand Group with over 30 years experience in strategically propelling businesses forward. An enthusiastic entrepreneur with a drive to transform sales and marketing operations through out of the box thinking, George has been an integral part in helping global companies produce significant revenues. A thought leader and pioneer in the areas of Cloud computing, Sales Automation, marketing automation, and implementation methodologies, George has worked on strategic projects with such companies as Microsoft, Deloitte, HSBC Global Bank, Global Sources, and Computer Associates. As an accomplished strategic thinker, his expertise has been utilized to create significant bodies of work including the OnTarget Methodology originally designed for Navision A/S out of Denmark and later acquired by Microsoft; and, more recently, the channel transformation strategy for the Microsoft partner transition to cloud computing. Cutting edge and adept at anticipating changes in the market, George is an innovator of sales and marketing initiatives which keep pace with the evolution in client buying behaviors. Throughout his career, George has held executive positions in several practices, developed and sold multiple businesses, acted as a board member and executive business coach, and been repeatedly invited to deliver keynote talks at events such as Microsoft s Worldwide Partner Conference, Extreme CRM, and Directions. About Rand Group Rand Group is a professional services firm that serves the oil and gas, manufacturing, distribution, and construction segments within the state of Texas. Rand Group combines the business acumen of CPAs and industry specialists with the technology expertise of software developers and process improvement specialists to drive real business results utilizing technology. Consistently the fastest growing application partner in the US domestic market, Rand Group has built a reputation of making systems work for business. Rand Group. Software Delivered as Promised. No Surprises. For more information please visit Are You Suffering from QuickBooks Stress? All materials within are a copyright of the author and The Rand Group, LLC, 10