If your business is outgrowing QuickBooks, it’s likely that your financial insight has been impacted by the bottleneck in your accounting. Businesses that stick with QuickBooks for too long typically wind up in a stew of manual spreadsheets, time-consuming consolidations, disparate information silos for different business processes, and cryptic workarounds. All of this means that your accounting can become frustrating, error-prone, and vulnerable to fraud.

This leads to a bigger question: how much do these accounting problems influence the rest of your organization? Inefficient accounting is a bummer, but does it really matter that much? Poor accounting processes have two primary affects: wasted time, and reduced financial insight. Unfortunately, these problems may hurt your business more than you think.

Are decision makers uninformed or misinformed?

Outgrowing your accounting system impairs your financial insight, which can lead to blind decision-making for those in management positions. In order to make informed decisions, it’s critical to understand your areas for growth, have real-time data on budgets and spending, properly track projects and contracts, understand inventory levels and cash flow patterns, and more.

With advanced analytics made possible by high-quality accounting and business intelligence, it’s possible to make accurate predictions about the future of the market and your business before deciding your next steps. Being informed about the most likely consequences of your choices allows you to remain competitive and agile by proactively adapting to changes in the market.

As machine learning and business intelligence become more sophisticated, financial accounting is becoming even more central to successful businesses. Modern business accounting is steadily transforming from a method of historical record-keeping into a way of accessing real-time data in order to predict the future. If accounting in your business simply represents historical records and transactions, it’s hurting your competitiveness by inhibiting potential growth.

Everyone is in the dark

An information bottleneck can affect more than just your business’s management team. When employees aren’t well-informed about how they affect your organization’s financial health, they aren’t able to feel as deeply invested in financial success. Cluttered accounting processes and poor financial visibility make it difficult for workers to understand how their daily tasks help the organization. This lack of insight also provides less incentive for employees to stay within budgets or meet key performance indicators.

In contrast, a robust accounting package gives managers and employees more information by providing mobile access to customizable dashboards, as well as allowing certain users to view financial statements while including security to restrict the changes they can make. This allows more team members to be involved in your finances without compromising the accuracy or security of your books.

In order to keep up with your competitors, you need to be able to make quick decisions based on real-time data that matters most to your business. Your accounting should be a competitive advantage, not a burden. This is why we recommend growing organizations to take a hard look at QuickBooks earlier rather than later.

Interested in learning more? Download the ebook, Life After QuickBooks to dive deeper into these issues and determine if your business is outgrowing QuickBooks.

If you’re ready for an unbiased assessment of whether or not your organization is outgrowing QuickBooks, contact us to schedule a discussion.