QuickBooks is a popular accounting software program used by small businesses around the world. It helps business owners to automate their accounting, invoicing, and preparing taxes. While QuickBooks is immensely popular and easy to use, it's not enough to effectively support a growing business.
Let's take a closer look into how an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution helps even small business owners to scale up, boost their operational efficiency and productivity, and in turn, increase their revenues. All this (and more), while saving valuable time, resources, and costs.
ERP helps businesses to automate their operational business processes and finances, and streamline and synchronize their business data. An ERP system consists of multiple modules, features, and functionality to seamlessly integrate operational workflows.
These can include Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools, Human Resource Management System (HRMS), financials and accounting, sales, warehousing and inventory, and many more. More often than not, ERP replaces small businesses' legacy standalone software when an organization is primed and ready to grow.
1. ERP is a comprehensive business management solution
QuickBooks can only handle a growing business' accounting and invoicing needs. While it does its job well, it just isn't enough. Most businesses end up purchasing or subscribing to multiple software solutions for different business operations. ERP is a comprehensive solution that effectively manages and controls most business operations. It helps businesses to automate their accounting, sales and marketing, human resources, inventory management, and even customer service and support. As ERP is often offered as an entire suite with various modules that target every aspect of a company's operations, it's regarded as 'holistic' business solution. The ERP system is viewed as a single entity that focuses on business processes themselves, rather than individual elements, such as documents, workflow, or people.
2. ERP is scalable
Though ERP is often offered as an entire suite with multiple modules that target different areas of a business's operations, it is scalable. In other words, most vendors allow their customers to choose only a few modules initially and add features and functionality as they expand their operations. For a growing business, scalability is vitally important, as it helps to reduce expenses while maintaining access to tools that are otherwise unaffordable. QuickBooks, on the other hand, only helps businesses with general accounting processes. If they want to automate another area of their operations, they will have to purchase an additional software solution, which over time, can add up to costly IT expenses, not to mention maintaining and supporting a host of different software programs.
3. ERP helps streamline communication between departments
QuickBooks is a product that focuses primarily on a business's accounting and invoicing. As a result, it does not support nor enhance communication between departments that don't have access to accounting data. ERP, on the other hand, unifies data from different departments, and system access can be granted as needed to various departments inside the organization. This enhances intra-company communication, which in turn, enhances employee, team, and department management. An ERP system, for example, enables sales and customer support teams to communicate with one another, and share business data with their entire supply chains, such as warehouse managers, sales reps in the field, human resources, and many others.
4. ERP eliminates data redundancy
Many businesses use different software programs for different business operations. This results in multiple copies of data, leading to duplication and redundancy. If one department, for example, uses QuickBooks for accounting, while marketing and sales uses another, there will be vast amounts of data, and often the same data, entered into different software systems. An ERP syncs all business data in real-time across all departments, where all of the company's data is stored in a single location, on a single software platform, that's easily accessible by all employees. In turn, every department accesses the same data, while changes and updates are instantly visible to all, based on user permission levels. The results? Increased operational efficiency and productivity, and fewer human errors across the board.
5. ERP generates in-depth insights
QuickBooks generates valuable reports based on accounting data, invoices raised, payments processed, and more. However, it doesn't have access to other software tools that a business may concurrently use. As a result, its reports are not as comprehensive as a business might want them to be. On the other hand, ERP reports are comprehensive, as they are based on real-time data generated from various departments. This helps business managers and owners to gain real insights into their operations, view their actual performance, and make more accurate forecasts based on better-informed business decisions.
Scaling up? Consider ERP in place of QuickBooks
It shouldn't come as a surprise that a number of businesses have turned their attention to ERP to replace QuickBooks. ERP offers exceedingly more features and functionality, it's scalable to grow as your business grows, and it eliminates duplication of data. This directly enhances productivity and helps businesses to achieve their objectives, faster and easier. What's more, ERP helps growing businesses to make better-informed business decisions based on real-time data and actionable insights.
To implement ERP successfully and scale up quickly, contact us for a no-obligation call with one of our ERP implementation experts.
The Author
