In the early days of a small business, you need smart, simple, accounting software that takes care of the basic bookkeeping tasks. For many businesses, this ends up being Intuit QuickBooks – a well-known name within basic financial data management.
However, the software solutions that small businesses start with are rarely the best choice for larger businesses, or companies that are growing rapidly or expanding internationally. At a certain point, it becomes time to look for a broad financial solution. One that streamlines your business processes across different departments and draws your data together. One with increased functionality and scalability. A solution like NetSuite.
How do you know when you’ve reached this point? For different businesses, the signs can vary. But figuring out when you’ve got there, and knowing the benefits that swapping over to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software solution like NetSuite can bring, makes the transition a lot easier. It will definitely make business operations a lot smoother.
In this post, we’ll explore some of the signs you need to look out for, as well as what improvements you can expect to see. We’ll also cover how to make sure the process is as smooth as possible once it begins.
First, we’ll start by looking at exactly what these different pieces of software are.
Intuit QuickBooks is straightforward accounting software designed for the needs of small businesses and freelancers. It contains all the functionality you need for basic accounting, without being so complicated that you need extensive accounting experience, training or knowledge to use it.
QuickBooks is excellent at what it does, and what it does is make accounting as painless as possible for small businesses. What it’s not so great at is scaling with rapidly expanding businesses.
Whilst it is intuitive to use, allows you to track income and expenditure in a specific place and lets you create invoices and track inventory, expenses and other basic financial data (while automating some of the processes to increase data accuracy), its scope is limited and you’ll still need to do a lot of manual data entry.
NetSuite is a cloud-based business management platform. At its heart, it is a powerful enterprise resource planning system (ERP), that can manage core functions across finance, accounting, inventory management and procurement. But it can also support customer relationship management (CRM) (for sales, service and marketing), HR with performance management, employee expenses and record keeping, and professional services automation (PSA) too.
In fact, it brings together many key business processes into one unified system and can even store customer data.
Being one solution for all these functions, NetSuite pulls all its data from one common database. This ‘single source of truth’ reduces the need for manual data entry, increasing accuracy and efficiency and improving collaboration as information across the system updates in real time for all users. It leaves every user or department working from the most up-to-date and comprehensive data available at all times.
While some small businesses may find this functionality excessive, once your business starts to grow and the scale of data you need to manage rockets, it becomes essential. Relying on manual processes and data duplication will waste a lot of time and effort and significantly reduce accuracy. The overall impact on your data integrity will increase as your business grows, too.
| QuickBooks | NetSuite | |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Bookkeeping & basic accounting | Full business management, including finance & accounting |
| Reach | Limited, especially for multi-entity and international companies | Multi-entity, subsidiary & currency built in |
| Capability | Finance only | Extensive - Finance, CRM, Procurement, Billing, Projects, Inventory, Manufacturing |
| Reporting | Static & template-based | Dynamic, real-time & customisable |
| Users | Limited (often 1-25 users) | Unlimited/scalable |
| User permissions | Often all or nothing | Tailored and role-based |
Knowing what QuickBooks and NetSuite do is not enough to tell you when you need to switch. Here are some signs you can use to tell when a new system is needed.
Taking your business to a new international market is an exciting chapter. Normally, it’s also a point of massive growth and change.
But it’s not just an exciting opportunity; it is a big shift in logistical needs. QuickBooks’ functionality around multiple entities and multiple currencies is limited, so if you need to establish a new legal entity in another country, you will not be able to support that seamlessly through your existing QuickBooks setup.
NetSuite is an ERP built to meet the needs of larger and international businesses, so this global business management capability is embedded in its core functionality.
Most businesses aspire to make more sales, sign up more clients, or generally increase their transaction volumes. This is a reliable sign of success.
But if you can’t keep up with the data these transactions create, you aren’t succeeding, you’re floundering. QuickBooks can struggle to keep up with large volumes of data, causing issues in transaction accuracy.
Meanwhile, the manual data entry and duplication necessary when you’re using QuickBooks becomes a serious drain on staff time when handling large volumes of data.
For a small increase in volume, there may be methods to streamline within QuickBooks, but these are limited. If you are seeing higher and higher volumes, with a likelihood of this pattern continuing, then it is time to invest in an ERP that’s built to handle large volumes as standard, such as NetSuite.
The bigger a business gets, the more important reporting becomes. But, at the same time, it also becomes more complex. There may be more regulations to meet, they may be more difficult to meet, and the decision-making they are used to support will likely have bigger ramifications if something is wrong.
QuickBooks is unlikely to be able to handle all the information you need in one place, and this makes manual duplication necessary. And manual duplication is much slower to process, leaves you open to more mistakes, and inconsistent or inaccurate data, and this poses a risk when the importance of this data has increased.
With NetSuite, you get that vital ‘single source of truth’. Your data can be used for multiple processes or purposes with no need for duplication or reproduction. This increases accuracy and reliability, allowing you to make vital business decisions from an informed perspective. However good your finance team is, they’ll always be better working from unified data.
There are other signs your business needs to move from an accounting software like QuickBooks to an ERP system, even if it’s not rapidly expanding at the moment. Read our 7 signs your finance function has outgrown its tools post if you want to know what they are.
Moving to NetSuite from QuickBooks is not a case of quickly transferring some data. The differing functionality of each software solution means that time needs to be spent setting up your new system effectively. A seamless transition between the two will take time and effort.
For this reason, a lot of businesses choose to work with a NetSuite partner to manage NetSuite implementation and data migration. Here at NoBlue2, we’re experts in all aspects of NetSuite, so we will protect critical data, help you set up all the relevant functionality your business needs and make sure all the technical aspects of your NetSuite solution are tailored to your goals and business processes.
We know all the possible integration challenges and how to avoid them, so we can minimise the disruption caused by the changeover.
We’ll take all the complexity out of your software migration so you can enjoy every possible benefit.
Still unsure if you need to change from QuickBooks to NetSuite? Here are some of the questions we're most commonly asked by people who are thinking about moving to NetSuite.
NetSuite has a much broader functionality, can be used across multiple departments and can bring much bigger time efficiency savings. But even we can admit it isn’t always the best choice.
Small businesses don’t always need such varied functionality. When you’re working in small volumes, the increased cost of NetSuite isn’t necessarily justified – you can simply end up paying for functions you don’t use.
However, if you are looking to scale your business – or if it is already sizable but you haven’t yet updated your system to match core processes which are increasing in complexity – then NetSuite is usually the best option.
NetSuite is comprehensive and feature-rich software, and, by necessity, it takes slightly more effort to learn than a tool like QuickBooks. It is, however, designed to be as user-friendly as possible and once you grasp the basics, it should become intuitive and simple to increase your skills.
However, working alongside a NetSuite partner to implement the software does give you access to tailored training and user adoption support that will help your team adapt to the new software and its advanced features a lot quicker to give a smooth transition.
As with learning how to use NetSuite, the migration process from QuickBooks can vary in complexity and timeframe. The size of the task depends on the size of your business, your industry and the extent of functionality you’re looking to use.
But, if you’re looking to get the most benefits possible from your NetSuite implementation, then working with an expert in NetSuite migration will simplify things, ensure a successful migration process, and help you access the full functionality.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to give an overall estimate for timescales for an implementation project like this without understanding the business better. Depending on the size of your business, the complexity of your data, the functionality you want from NetSuite and many other factors, it can take anything from 3 months to 6 months.
We have over 25 years of experience helping businesses streamline their financial processes, so we know how to handle your migration efficiently. We’ll ensure your new NetSuite solution is tailored to meet your specific needs, while also ensuring that your business performance is not impacted by the changeover.
If you’d like to know more about what this migration entails, or how we can support you with it, talk to our team today.
