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Guest post by: Marty Zigman Become an Author

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QuickBooks is the number one default software package that a new business owner purchases and installs on their PC to help manage accounting. QuickBooks is pretty prolific and is a good value for the money, but it’s only useful while the business is still small. People begin to experience pain when their company grows to include 15 or more employees.

So how do you know if QuickBooks is choking your growth? Here are some early symptoms of a dangerous bottleneck.

Here are some early symptoms of a dangerous bottleneck. QuickBooks is the number one default software package that a new business owner purchases and installs on their PC to help manage accounting. QuickBooks is pretty prolific and is a good value for the money, but it’s only useful while the business is still small. People begin to experience pain when their company grows to include 15 or more employees.

1. Employees Create Their Own Tracking Systems Independent of QuickBooks, Such As Spreadsheets Oftentimes, employees start to create a multitude of other tracking systems independent of QuickBooks that they’re using to manage the business. A classic sign: spreadsheets and Word documents. Once you have 15 or more employees, each person starts to develop his or her own tracking system for their work, which means that none of the employees are ever on the same page at the same time (so to speak) and therefore, they are unable to collaborate efficiently. Each employee develops separate spreadsheets of potential customers, the contact information of customers, customer quotes, a list of products, and so on. Then they begin emailing it to each other. When this occurs, it is a sign that your company is going to experience significant growing pains and is an indication that QuickBooks is no longer effective, as these various tracking systems are byproducts of employees attempting to “figure it out.” They are not intelligently using their information technology, often because they don’t know when or how to use QuickBooks or don’t intuitively think to use it in the first place.

2. As your company grows, you rely on your accountant to create the financial picture, but can’t get information until that accountant works their magic, which is frustrating. Although you may have QuickBooks for your business, you may rely on an accountant to create the financial picture, but you can’t access that information until actually speaking with the accountant and waiting for those numbers to be produced. As a result, it feels like too much work to obtain financial clarity. Having to contact the accountant, especially when the information is needed immediately and isn’t readily available, starts to cause frustration. This is an early symptom of a dangerous bottleneck.

3. Are 3 sales reports telling you 3 different things? Do you not trust your reports? As a company, you might have different reports based on category, sales by region, client/customer, product/product type, and so on. In theory, the sum of all of those reports would be the same; you would simply be examining the same information by looking at it in a few different ways. When your company can no longer trust its reports because none of them are consistent and fail to add up to the same results, pain is experienced.

4. Is QuickBooks at home in your office, and you’re traveling on business and need somebody to go get the information for you? You may have bought QuickBooks for your business, and often installed the software on the PC in your home office. This becomes problematic if multiple people are working for your company and can only access the program from one location, especially if you are traveling or are away from the office.

5. Is QuickBooks taking too long to load, performing poorly, or indicating data corruption? It can take up to 20 minutes for QuickBooks to load up onto a computer, as the software was designed to handle only small amounts of data. When QuickBooks starts running slowly or data starts to get corruption problems, it is another sign that your business is outgrowing it.

Why Upgrade to NetSuite? NetSuite is a software service offered over the internet that is designed to help businesses when multiple people are working together. Every employee can work together and all elements of your business can be fully integrated in real time. For example: if you are a business owner in NYC and one of your employees enters a sale into NetSuite from L.A., you will know immediately, as there is zero delay in access of information. Since NetSuite is based online, it works with browsers on computers and smart phones alike, availing access to information from virtually any location that provides internet connection.

NetSuite is more than just a service: It’s a platform. It can be customized to track information that it wasn’t even designed to track. Creating spreadsheets is fine, but as a business, you want that information in your central system so that everyone can see and use it. The need for spreadsheets diminishes dramatically with a system that allows information to be shared with the entire company in real time. You can’t do that with QuickBooks. QuickBooks is not designed to be customized, and therefore, it is not powerful.

People leave QuickBooks because they want freedom. They want to add employees without performance problems and their crucial information getting tied up or duplicated. NetSuite guarantees that your company information is reliable, high integrity, and matches up. You want to ensure that your company is on a software platform you can grow with so that you don’t have to experience that pain ever again. NetSuite can continue to be customized as a company grows based on its own individual needs, making it the most logical choice when it is time to upgrade from QuickBooks.

Copyright © Marty Zigman 2011

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