When a business is small or first starting out, it makes sense to use basic accounting software. Or even to use spreadsheets. These options are more intuitive; most people have some experience with spreadsheets, so they’re easier to manage when you’re too tight on money to fund feature-filled software, and too tight on time to learn how to use it.
But when your business grows, this basic approach to financial management won’t work. When you’re working from a large number of spreadsheets, filling them all out or cross-referencing across a number of them stops being the simplest option.
Instead, it leaves you open to mistakes that can throw off forecasting and reporting. They can even leave you paying tax incorrectly.
But with NetSuite, things are different. One of its main benefits is how scalable it is. The moment your business outgrows a spreadsheet, NetSuite can help you keep your finances accurate. And, it will continue to have the necessary functionality, however big your business grows. From a profitable SME all the way up to a multi-national business with a multi-million annual turnover, NetSuite scales alongside you to ensure your finance processes always deliver accurate information that supports business success.
As experts in NetSuite implementation and the benefits it brings, we’re perfectly placed to explain how the software scales with businesses, and how it can support your growth – so we’re going to do so in this blog post. We’ll also cover signs that you may need to upgrade.
When a business grows, the number of transactions, stakeholders and operational processes involved also increases. This makes financial management a lot more complicated – what works for a £1 million business can quickly cause a bottleneck for a £25 million turnover business.
Here are some of the issues businesses encounter during growth that make a traditional spreadsheet-based approach unsuitable:
All of these changes do make for an exciting period for your business, but one that can lead to pitfalls. Basic accounting practices will struggle to keep up with these challenges.
In truth, the biggest red flag that you need to overhaul your accounting and financial management is that your team spends more time collecting and collating information than they do analysing it. However, this can show up in different ways:
Reporting is an important part of any growing business. It’s necessary for legal and tax compliance, for trend prediction, to enable informed decision-making, and to ensure stakeholder buy-in. But when you’re covering a larger number of transactions or financial movements in every report, it can also be time-consuming.
If your process involves exporting data from multiple systems or collating from multiple spreadsheets, then you’re spending unnecessary time on reporting. Your business has grown beyond the basic accounting stage, and further growth could be compromised by your current approach.
If the numbers for stock levels across your warehouse, ecommerce platform and finance system don’t match, your ability to meet demand is destroyed. When data has to be manually input and duplicated in different places, the chances of mistakes or inconsistencies increase. And even if it is correct at the point of entry, you’re still often left working with out-of-date information because it has to be updated manually.
As explained above, breaking into new international markets or working under a number of different businesses doesn’t just bring problems of increased customers. It there’s whole new sets of regulations to comply with, taxes to consider, and customer expectations to meet.
With basic accounting software, consolidating these competing needs can be complicated. With spreadsheets, manual compliance is both complicated and incredibly time-consuming – never a good use of time, but an even more misdirected one when you should be supporting your growing business.
This is also not the time to be increasing staffing costs to cover unnecessary work, when you could be hiring to support more vital roles.
If any or all of the above points start to feel relevant to your business, chances are you need to look at switching up your current finance solution to a NetSuite ERP. However, the clearest and easiest thing to spot is that you’re spending hours or even days every month simply moving data between platforms, rather than digging into it to find the insights that will help your business grow even more.
The main way NetSuite helps businesses scale is by bringing all aspects of your financial processes together. It connects the processes that were previously spread across multiple spreadsheets, documents and databases to help support growth rather than hinder it. Here’s how:
When your finance, sales, inventory, and customer information are stored in separate systems, your team is often left working with different numbers and information. This leads them to make inaccurate or even conflicting predictions. And either way, it can leave you making decisions that harm your business rather than help it grow.
When all this information is centralised in NetSuite, you can make sure every single team member works off the same data and that their data is always up to date. Sales teams can
see orders and customer information in real time, finance teams can access up-to-date revenue and cash flow, and leadership can view current business performance in a single platform. And they’ll always be referring to the same figures and facts.
NetSuite takes processes such as invoicing, purchase order approvals and processing, bank reconciliations and financial close activities and automates them.
This is beneficial for businesses of most sizes, freeing up staff time from repetitive and duplicated tasks and allowing them to focus on analysis and strategic planning instead. However, it is even more important for businesses going through significant growth.
This phase usually involves a disproportionate increase in administrative workload, often before you’re financially able to increase the size of your team accordingly. NetSuite can help you bridge this gap by ensuring staff can be used as effectively as possible.
During a period of growth, your business needs to be agile. You need to be able to capitalise on opportunities, but also not waste time chasing options that are doomed to fail. To know where your money and effort are best directed. If you don’t, that growth can stall, or even begin to damage the company as you’re unable to manage it.
Agile business decisions need to be based on data. Real-time data. NetSuite makes it easier to have access to this data across your whole business so that any decision made is an informed one.
With NetSuite’s real-time dashboards and reporting tools, you can monitor revenue performance, cash flow, inventory levels and business impact so you can go from reactive to proactive management. And by making the right decisions that consistently support your business, you’ll be able to keep growing it.
One significant way that a NetSuite ERP system can help your business scale is that it scales organically with you. No need to modify or replace your system if your business continues to grow.
Rather than leaving you to seek out a new financial solution every couple of years. NetSuite provides an agile business solution that doesn’t need replacing or extensive workarounds to get the information you need. NetSuite was designed with the needs of bigger businesses in mind, so it has all the functionality that bigger, established businesses need.
Adopting a NetSuite ERP is only the first step towards streamlining your business operations. If you don’t use the platform correctly though, you’ll be paying for the software without experiencing all the benefits it can bring.
Working with an implementation partner can help ensure you do get the best from NetSuite. We can help you tailor your implementation to maximise the features that most benefit your business, based on industry, current business operations, objectives and future goals.
We can also manage a phased implementation and user adoption, particularly important during growth phases. We can help your team get to grips with the software as easily as possible, so they’re not wasting time tripping over how to use it when you need them focused on the business.
The UK's most experienced NetSuite implementation partner
We’ve helped over 375 companies discover all the benefits that a new NetSuite ERP can deliver.
If you’d like to know more about how NetSuite can help support your business as it scales, or how to implement an ERP while your business is growing so that the process supports success rather than limiting it, then let’s talk.
