Why Your Company May Dump QuickBooks This Year
By: Gene Marks, President, The Marks Group
Believe it or not, your company is about to be part of an enormous wave of change in the next few years.
That’s because, if you’re like most small and medium sized businesses, you’re likely using an on-premise accounting application. And most likely that on-premise solution is QuickBooks. QuickBooks is by far the most popular accounting application for SMBs and deservedly so – it’s full featured, easy to use and well supported by Intuit. My company is an Intuit INTU +2.97% partner. We sell QuickBooks. But this year we’re going to look into selling other products as well. Why? Because as good as QuickBooks is, I believe that many of my clients are going to dump it starting this year and over the next few years. You too.
That’s because the cloud has caught up to the accounting world. And there are many competitors to QuickBooks standing by to pounce.
My consulting firm serves about 600 active companies. More than 90% of them currently use an on-premise accounting (or financial management or Enterprise Resource Planning/ERP) application. Isn’t it ridiculously obvious that within the next few years just about all of those companies will be using a cloud-based application instead? Of course it is. I’ve watched the enormous growth of software-as-a-service applications for customer relationship management, human resources and payroll. I’ve noticed the faster performance. I’ve witnessed their ease of access from tablets and mini-laptops and even smartphones. I’ve watched companies move more and more of their in-house systems to hosted ones, eliminating their servers and IT infrastructure. And I’ve seen my own clients, small business owners who look at any new relationship or technology with a wary eye, grow more comfortable letting other companies handle their data on managed servers over the past few years. We admit that though no one’s infallible, the security that they provide are better than our own. The environment is perfect for cloud based accounting applications.
