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How Far Can QuickBooks Take Your Company

Implementing ERP software is a strange business at times.

Over the past 10 or 15 years or so, I have consulted with hundreds of companies, derived from many industries. I have seen mom-and-pop “stores” to multi-state, multi-national companies with departments built for every menial task.

What has continued to surprise me the most is to find out how many not only started out on QuickBooks, but how many continued to thrive on QuickBooks, even though their companies had clearly outgrown the product.

There are several reasons why companies start out this way. QuickBooks is by far the easiest program to start up. Once the quick installation is done, you can literally start writing checks to your vendors, generating invoices to your customers, and receiving checks from your customers. QuickBooks implies simplicity. This way, the owner of a business can focus on running his or her business, and know that the accounting will be easy to understand (after all, most owners start a business knowing a trade, not accounting). A third reason that many thousands of businesses wind up on QuickBooks is shear volume – buying QuickBooks is like buying a Microsoft operating system – you cannot go wrong.

One of the many reasons that companies, as they grow, are able to stay with QuickBooks is that they attach an industry-specific solution. For example, not only are there many solutions that integrate with QuickBooks, such as the job shop product E2, there are products with-in the QuickBooks family that address vertical markets, such as point-of-sale and professional time billing. And of course, Intuit, the publisher of QuickBooks, has added the QuickBooks Enterprise addition, which is keeping companies on the product longer. Now, database size, and number of user limitations is all but eliminated from the small business.

But, inevitably, many companies face the fact that they will outgrow QuickBooks some day. Larger, more robust products, such as MAS 90 and MAS 500, offer flexibility that QuickBooks does not. Financial and sales professionals need to manipulate the data in a way that makes sense to them –more sophisticated products offer “views” to allow the data to be viewed in almost any way imaginable. Sometimes a company can grow and create one or more companies as a byproduct, thus creating a need for consolidated financial statement reporting. Cost accounting creates another challenge for QuickBooks that other ERP systems can overcome by using serialized, lot, FIFO, LIFO or other costing methods.

I have seen QuickBooks manage the accounting records of multi-million dollar companies, but normally, an industry-specific solution solves the operations side. More often than not, due to a demand for flexibility, customizability, and sophisticated queries, larger companies eventually convert from their initial QuickBooks accounting product to another product designed for larger companies.

See also: Sage MAS 90 - Quickbooks Users Editions