QuickBooks has been a reliable go to for years, helping businesses big and small manage their books. While it has many advantages, QuickBooks may no longer be the best solution for companies scaling up in a dynamic, digital world. Has QuickBooks withstood the test of time, especially in the face of feature-rich and dynamic technology such as ERP? Here are some disadvantages of this legacy solution and why it may be time for your business to .
Top Reasons to Replace QuickBooks
It’s not industry specific.
QuickBooks was long considered a great tool for double-entry accounting, but it has grown little beyond that. Further to that point, it has no industry-specific versions that might answer to the requirements of a specific niche or space. Meanwhile, ERP solutions offer bespoke systems that answer directly to the needs of specific industries, such as manufacturing or retail, with industry-specific feature sets.
It doesn’t scale well.
QuickBooks is not an ideal solution for businesses looking to scale up. It limits users and transactions, for one. Additionally, it can’t handle larger file sizes. Finally, its enormous upgrade fees can give you and your growing business sticker shock year after year. SMBs hoping to grow in scope in the years to come may find QuickBooks to be stagnant and burdensome.
Its feature set is thin.
Another of the significant disadvantages of QuickBooks is in its feature set. As mentioned above, QuickBooks doesn’t offer much functionality outside the accounting office, so its interdepartmental reporting is lackluster. You won’t get the “big picture” data with QuickBooks that you might get with an ERP, as well. Other weak spots in terms of features include no invoice design and lack of support for single-entry accounting.
It’s not a holistic solution.
While QuickBooks has attempted to take a more holistic approach to business, it is not the comprehensive business tool it should be in 2021 and beyond. An ERP addresses your entire company, providing accounting, sales, and inventory tracking modules (just to name a few) in one holistic solution. With more and more business solutions focusing on this type of holistic approach, sticking with a siloed solution seems behind the times.
Too many loopholes make its audit trail look like Swiss cheese.
Finally, QuickBooks does not maintain a secure enough audit trail for most businesses. Some data in the solution is editable without documentation after the fact. Given its reputation as an accounting solution, this is maybe its biggest weak spot and one of the most persuasive reasons to replace it.
QuickBooks has been reliable for years, but it may be time for your business to move on. What have your experiences with QuickBooks been? Have you moved on to bigger and better things? Chime in and let us know in the comments below. If you want to see what life could be like after QuickBooks at your company. Or are you just not sure where to go from here? We can help with that too.
