The 4 cons of QuickBooks you should never ignore
All software is not created equal. You know this. Something that works perfectly for your team, might not work at all for another team.
And even so, something that works for your business now, might not work for it later.
QuickBooks is a prime example.
As a small business, QuickBooks may fit your needs perfectly. But as your company grows, it will become more likely that your needs will outgrow this particular accounting solution.
Sure, QuickBooks is easy to use and cost-efficient. But at the end of the day, it’s easy to use and cost-efficient for smaller companies … and nothing more.
As a large company, the simplicity QuickBooks is loved for can end up costing your business in more ways than one. And here are four reasons why.
It’s a workaround for the workaround.
QuickBooks does everything you need it to do … until it doesn’t. The minute your company starts growing, you’ll begin to notice just how much QuickBooks doesn’t do.
And what will all of this result in?
Spreadsheets. Lots and lots of workarounds. And plenty of manual labor.
Because of this, two things will happen:
Errors
Since you’re doing some processes manually, there will be errors. That’s just how it works. Put a human in front of an Excel spreadsheet and it’ll only be a matter of time before a “1” accidentally becomes a “10” and a “yes” mistakenly becomes a “no.”
Wasted Time
All of this manual labor and all of these workarounds equate not just to errors … but to time. And a lot of it. Creating and working with processes, spreadsheets, and applications outside of QuickBooks requires a lot of time and effort that your team may or may not have to give.
How many times can one person re-enter data?
Unfortunately, that manual data entry only stands to get worse.
You see, when it comes to data, it’s never a one-and-done type thing. You’ll need to enter data into QuickBooks, more data into your designated workarounds, more data when this data is no longer up-to-date, and then even more data when you need to make all of your workarounds successfully mesh with QuickBooks.
All of this entering and re-entering will only lead to more errors and even more wasted time.
Partially real-time visibility.
As a recap, you have all of this data in multiple locations — data that should technically be housed under the same platform.
On top of this, you have generic QuickBooks reports that suit “traditional” needs — which means you may or may not have access to the information you actually need.
With both of these simple realities combined, one not-so-simple truth comes to the surface:
You have no real-time visibility.
To some, this might not seem like a big deal, but that would be a poor assumption to make. Real-time visibility allows you to see things as they really are, and in doing so, you gain the ability to make strategic decisions for your business.
With every piece of current data at your fingertips, you can now see the “big picture.”
I’ll have a side of downtime with that spreadsheet.
QuickBooks doesn’t exactly have the greatest track record when it comes to uptime and reliability.
A few years ago, this happened:
“At 10 PM PDT 5/22, we introduced a storage-level change to address a performance issue we noticed on Monday. Unfortunately, an error occurred while implementing the change, and this error introduced a synchronization gap. Once we realized that the data had not synchronized for a subset of customers, at 9 AM PDT on 5/23, we took them offline until we could fix it.”
Intuit
One full day later …
“At 10 PM PDT on 5/23, we provided access to approximately 2,000 of these customers who had very few transactions so they could very quickly synchronize their data. At 10 AM PDT on 5/24, we restored access to the remaining 3,700 customers. All affected customers can now login to QuickBooks to see what steps to take to re-enter the few transactions that are missing.”
Intuit
Which was quickly followed up by …
“[Intuit has] lost about a hundred (or more) entries that my team and I made between 10 PM Pacific on Tuesday night, and 10 AM Pacific the next day. This situation is so tragically, monumentally stupid that I can’t even bring myself to get angry about it.”
Angry Intuit Customer
As well as …
“This is more than annoying. I feel this borders on breach of contract. I was without service for over 24 hours.”
Yet Another Angry Intuit Customer
However, this is not the only type of issue Intuit customers are forced to deal with. Once your business starts to acquire massive amounts of data, it can considerably slow down QuickBooks. In doing so, your team can (and most likely will) suffer from software crashes and glitches on a regular basis — both of which will lead to nothing good for your business.
But don’t worry … there is another option.
Back in the day, QuickBooks may have appeared like the only feasible accounting solution for growing businesses. Again, it had a little something to do with that ease-of-use and cost-efficiency mentioned earlier.
Jumping onto a different accounting solution would have meant a much larger infrastructure — and with that, there would have been more expenses, responsibilities, and problems.
However, things are different now.
With the rise of cloud computing, transitioning to an accounting solution designed for larger companies is much more plausible for an SMB. Instead of hosting that “larger infrastructure” on-premise, it’s now hosted in the cloud and managed by a third-party vendor. This limits most — if not all — of the risk associated with a more intensive financial management solution.
With a cloud-based solution, you can receive all the benefits of an on-premise, higher-grade accounting platform, minus the cons. Work with a scalable solution that pulls in real-time data and relies on custom reporting.
If you’d like to learn more about transitioning to a cloud-based accounting solution, give us a call or send us a message today. We specialize in ERP software implementation and consulting, and we have decades of combined experience helping companies of all shapes and sizes transition to cloud-based solutions.
