Your business started out with QuickBooks, but is it the right solution to fuel the next stage of your business’s growth? Are you starting to hit the limits of QuickBooks today?
NetSuite has been working with businesses that have reached the limits of QuickBooks for more than 11 years. In the process, we’ve spoken with thousands of small-and medium-sized businesses like yours — and many of them have already moved from QuickBooks to the NetSuite business cloud. We’ve gained insights from small business owners, finance executives, sales managers and IT professionals at companies across a wide range of industries. While the businesses themselves are diverse, the business issues they faced that led to their decision to move beyond QuickBooks are remarkably similar.
By moving from QuickBooks to NetSuite, these businesses no longer had to worry about lost data, performance problems, re-keying information between sales, finance and fulfillment systems, or struggling to get the reports they need to run their business. They’re able to increase the number of orders they can handle without their systems creaking, and they’re able to free up headcount by eliminating expensive manual processes.
For these companies, NetSuite has proven to be the one powerful solution that automatically integrates their sales, accounting, inventory management and webstores. It provides employees with anytime, anywhere access— easily supporting remote workers and locations. Companies no longer have the pain of worrying about managing software in-house. They have real-time visibility into how their business is performing, and they’re better connected with their customers and vendors than ever before.
In this analysis, you’ll find the key reasons to move from QuickBooks to NetSuite, and the benefits your business can gain. And you’ll get access to an ROI study from independent research firm Nucleus Research listing the tangible benefits that NetSuite can deliver at your company.
4 Reasons You Can’t Afford Not to Switch from QuickBooks
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QuickBooks is a point solution that doesn’t support your entire company. Because QuickBooks is only focused on accounting, when it comes to fulfilling customer orders, tracking sales opportunities, or manage customer service, you always need separate applications — whether those are homegrown systems, or applications that you integrate yourself. You end up relying on other applications to complete an order, with employees wasting time entering information twice, or trying to reconcile customer account and billing information. The result is often billing, customer service snafus or fulfillment errors — all costing your business money, decelerating cash flow and ultimately impacting customer satisfaction. The NetSuite Difference: NetSuite supports all your accounting, sales and service, inventory, fulfillment and ecommerce operations in one integrated business management suite. NetSuite eliminates costly integration work to glue business processes and departments together, and you no longer need to waste time manually re-entering information between systems. You gain integrated workflows — from order-to-cash through to procure-to-pay — that accelerate cash flow and ensure stronger vendor relationships. In the end, you’re able to respond more quickly to your business environment, customers or vendor needs, further differentiating your business from your competitors’.
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QuickBooks gives you limited visibility into business performance. With QuickBooks, you’ll never achieve a comprehensive real-time view of your business performance. This is because the data you need to make decisions is often not just in QuickBooks — it’s buried in other applications across your business. As a result, it’s easy to spend too much time collecting, integrating and distributing data in spreadsheets, and even then, you’ll almost certainly still end up making decisions based on outdated information. More importantly, you don’t have reliable information on sales, inventory, order statuses, accounts payable balances or other critical data. Consequently, crucial business decisions are based on incorrect assumptions due to inaccurate and out-of-date information.
The NetSuite Difference: NetSuite provides you with two key advantages. Unlike QuickBooks, NetSuite provides business performance dashboards as standard, all accessible from a web browser so they’re securely available from anywhere. With NetSuite, everyone in your business — sales, finance and service — can get a personalized view into the key metrics and information they need to manage their business function, whether that’s bookings, billings, backlogs, trends over time, or period-on-period performance. And they’ll be able to drill down to the live underlying transactions to make the changes needed drive your business performance. They’ll even be able to access the reports they need from on the road from mobile devices such as an Apple iPhone or a BlackBerry.
The second key advantage is that NetSuite reports on all your business data from a single common data repository. You get a 360-degree view of your customer, which is unachievable when you have customer data sprawl. It means rather than having to make phone calls, ask for spreadsheets or dig into different systems, all customer information is right at your fingertips. Your sales team can make customer calls with all the information they need about the customer — opportunity status, payment history and service levels. Your finance team gets the complete customer satisfaction picture when an invoice is late, and your service team gets visibility into the proximity to critical renewal dates.
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With QuickBooks, you always have to worry about IT issues and costs. QuickBooks requires you to manage and update the software yourself, as well as the other systems you maintain to run your business. In addition, you also have to worry about ongoing availability, maintaining backups and constantly worrying about database performance, and even the risk of hitting the maximum 20-user limit of QuickBooks Enterprise. In fact, many QuickBooks users often experience a loss of data, or face unacceptable delays in menus, screens or reports at some point. You also have to spend cycles maintaining costly and error-prone integrations with other business systems.
The NetSuite Difference: In contrast, NetSuite is a cloud-based solution, which means that that NetSuite runs the application for you, and we house your data in our world-class data center. NetSuite eliminates having to worry about backups, security, upgrades, performance and other typical IT issues that slow down your business. To give you peace of mind around security and privacy, NetSuite is even PCI DSS compliant—screened even to hold sensitive customer data, providing your business with a level of security that would cost tens of thousands of dollars to achieve in-house. With NetSuite, you’ll also experience round-the-clock availability that is realistically unachievable with QuickBooks: NetSuite provides a 99.5% Service Level Commitment. (And because NetSuite is delivered through a web browser, you can access the application anytime and from anywhere.) Even better, NetSuite handles upgrades for you, keeping your business up to date with the latest innovations automatically twice per year.
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QuickBooks has limited functionality that will limit your business. QuickBooks limits how you run your operation, so that, very often, you’re adapting your business to the application, rather than vice versa. It’s easy to run out of headroom when you need to handle more customers, vendors, or inventory items than QuickBooks can practically handle. When you need full audit trails, rich business planning and reporting, or automated processes, you’ll find yourself having to add additional systems and patches. In addition, QuickBooks simply can’t provide the stronger financial controls, better SKU management and support for more complex financial processes—such as recurring billing and invoicing—that growing businesses need.
The NetSuite Difference: In contrast, NetSuite was built from the ground up to give small- and medium-sized businesses like yours the headroom you need to grow your business. NetSuite is used by public companies, international corporations, and divisions of multibillion-dollar businesses. Their business challenges range from multiple currencies, local tax management and financial consolidation all the way through to ensuring SOX compliance—challenges you may face as your business continues to grow. NetSuite offers editions of its solution specifically tailored to meet the challenges of your industry, while NetSuite OneWorld is designed to meet the needs of global businesses.
But NetSuite is more than a sales, service and financial application: it also provides order and inventory management, ecommerce, and powerful web capabilities than connect you with your customers and vendors. NetSuite also lets you create 24/7 customer centers to enhance customer interaction and foster long-term loyalty, as well as vendor centers that give your reselling partners views into real-time inventory, enabling them to transact with your company online.
NetSuite is the first solution to deliver on the promise of intelligent, integrated and simpler applications for
growing and midsize businesses.NetSuite is intelligent. The system holds all corporate data in a single database, giving you access to your key performance metrics on a customizable, real-time dashboard. As a result, NetSuite enables you to make
better, faster decisions.NetSuite is integrated. Within a single, powerful application, it combines complete customer-facing CRM and Ecommerce capabilities with back-office Accounting/ERP and self-service portals for partners. As a result, it allows companies to unite fragmented data and automate processes from end to end.NetSuite is simple. With NetSuite, implementations are both faster and less expensive than traditional business applications. Modularity enables phased implementations according to your company’s need. In addition, click not code and advanced customization supports business as you define it. As a Web-based on-demand solution, NetSuite significantly reduces your total cost of ownership (TCO).
Why NetSuite?
Unify Business Processes across the Enterprise
With a single, integrated platform for CRM, Accounting/ERP and Ecommerce, you can automate key business functions across all departments, including sales, marketing, service, finance, inventory, order fulfillment, purchasing, and employee management. Your employees no longer have to re-enter data in different systems, rectify inconsistent or inaccurate data, or wait for batch updates. Instead, all your employees view and share accurate data in real time, leading to greater collaboration among departments
and increased productivity across your business.
Increase Visibility for Better Decision Making
Customizable Dashboards offer real-time access to key performance metrics, supporting intelligent, timely business decisions. In addition, full visibility into unified customer records results in more efficient and highly personalized sales, fulfillment, and service processes.
Extend Processes to Customers, Suppliers, and Partners
Given today’s need to work closely with partners through an extended enterprise, NetSuite offers selfservice portals that enhance both B2B and B2C collaboration. In addition, proactive notification of partner-specific events accelerates process cycles and improves responsiveness, ensuring your position as a preferred partner.
Customize and extend NetSuite with SuiteFlex
NetSuite is the world’s most customizable Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution. Click not code configuration and modular implementations jumpstart your business on NetSuite. Advanced customization with simpler, industry standard tools allows you to tailor business practices and processes to meet your specific company and industry requirements. Because our customization carries forward seamlessly with upgrades, we actually encourage you to highly customize NetSuite—make it your one-of-a-kind software application.
Get Superior Value with an Affordable Solution
Built from the ground up for growing and midsize businesses, NetSuite offers affordable pricing, accelerated implementation, and comprehensive support packages that results in unbeatable TCO. Plus, you eliminate the costly and time-consuming integration often associated with using a patchwork of disconnected systems. NetSuite also provides leading-edge professional services and educational programs that ensure efficient implementation and continued, long-term success.