We’re Fine, We Don’t Need to Replace Quickbooks. Are You Really “Fine”?

At a recent luncheon seminar, I met the COO of a smallish, but growing company which, like many others of its size, depended on QuickBooks to manage its accounting functions.  When I told him my firm represents Accounting Software, specifically Microsoft Dynamics GP he said that his company was fine with QuickBooks;  He said they were only about 14 employees, but they had a handful of divisions or company entities and managing those in QuickBooks sometimes got confusing.

I mentioned that difficulty managing multiple companies or entities is a common problem among QuickBooks users and that an organization with 14 employees isn’t as small a company as some think. Following our conversation, he introduced me to his Accounting Manager via email and we had a quick telephone chat.

It turned out the Accounting manager had been pulling her hair out trying to handle things with QuickBooks. She did a phenomenal job of building a network of reports and spreadsheets through Excel and third party sources to produce functional accounting, reporting, and forecasting, but maintaining these workarounds was a manual nightmare. 70% of this manager’s time was being spent on manual data entry and manipulation. The situation had gotten so complicated that she’d been approved to bring on an additional full time employee to help with all the manual data entry.

Even so, the Accounting Manager knew this was only a band aid and really didn’t solve anything. On one hand she liked being so “needed” but on the other, she knew this was a house of cards that could easily come toppling down. After a needs analysis and review, we were able to propose a solution with Microsoft Dynamics GP that handled all of today’s challenges and would be flexible and powerful enough to handle all of tomorrow’s growth. The budget for this solution was comparable to what the company had planned to pay the new employee for a single year of work. The return on investment in future years and efficiency gains were immediately obvious.

Now this Accounting Manager is free to spend her time on strategic planning, analyzing for improvement, and detailed forecasting based on real time, accurate, and historical data.

All the while, some of the company Executives thought they were “fine”. They didn’t know that sticking to their current accounting system was actually much more expensive than converting to a new solution, like Dynamics GP that better fit their needs.

Are you really “fine”? Check with us and see, maybe you are but maybe you’re not?

 

By: Mitch Jacobs, Intelligent Technologies, Inc., a South Carolina Microsoft Dynamics GP Reseller.