Staffing pioneer Robert Half once said, “Asking the right questions takes as much skill as giving the right answers.” When it comes to evaluating a new software solution and its vendor, knowing what to ask can mean the difference between choosing the right solution and the wrong solution. As you embark on the process of evaluating a QuickBooks alternative to take your business to the next level, you’ll find that there are many vendors, solutions, and features. In some ways, the possibilities are endless.
In order to focus in on the right options for your company and its evolving needs, consider asking the following questions when exploring a QuickBooks alternative:
#1: What is the extent of my company’s accounting needs today?
While Quickbooks offers a great out-of-the-box solution for startup companies, you’ve likely discovered that there are limitations as your company has grown and continues to scale.What are the most significant limitations that you are facing today? Which aspects of your accounting processes could benefit from automation? Where are you devoting resource to data entry or bulky processes that could be streamlined in the name of efficiency and cost savings?
Outcome: Identify the areas of your current accounting processes that are compromising growth and efficiency, such as managing multiple spreadsheets or manually keying data across several systems. Make a list of the must-haves and nice-to-haves that might exist in the Quickbooks alternative you choose to evaluate. This list will help your software vendor or Solution Provider really hone in on the features and benefits that are most critical your business.
#2: What are our needs beyond accounting?
You’ll quickly discover that many alternatives offer features beyond a standard financial management application. This is an opportunity for you to think about your organization holistically, and how this decision to implement new software could bring about increased automation and visibility across the entire organization and the potential to reduce cost. For example, instead of managing data across several disparate systems, how could centralizing your accounting, vendors, customers, projects, etc. from a single application empower your management team’s ability to make decisions?
Outcome: Take inventory of the various systems you are using to today to manage your business and how much time, energy, and budget is necessary to push and pull data between them. For example, where do you track leads, prospects, and customers? How do you support customer issues and returns? How do you manage inventory? Or how do you get internet orders into your accounting system? Make a list of non-accounting functions that could potentially be part of your future business suite. Again, prioritize must-haves vs. nice-to-haves.
#3: Is Best-of-Breed or Suite a better fit?
When it comes to choosing a new solution, you will need to consider which is better: a best-of-breed approach or a fully integrated suite. The answer depends on your business needs, your current investments in software, and your overall goals.
Having all your leads, prospects, customers, vendors, inventory, and all transactions and interactions in a single database/platform is a huge value proposition. This is especially true when it comes to creating reports, providing efficient service for customers, and making your employees’ jobs easier – not to mention the economies of scale established by having all your employees trained on a single application.
For other companies that have extensive departmental needs (e.g. Marketing Automation or Warehouse Management System) or maybe organizations that have invested significantly in a particular application (e.g. Salesforce CRM or Magento), it might make sense to consider integrating the systems instead of a system consolidation play. Modern cloud-based applications are designed with integrations in mind and have robust API’s to achieve this. However, system integrations will require some additional products and services to achieve this.
Outcome: As you can see there’s no right or wrong answer. Work up a cost benefit analysis to determine which approach makes the most sense both functionally and financially.
#4 : How will our needs evolve in 1, 3 and 5 years?
As a growing business, your needs are constantly evolving. That means that something that is a “nice-to-have” today, could easily become a “must-have” tomorrow. Of course, it is not always possible to anticipate your exact needs as you grow. However, it is wise to take a look at your strategic plan for the coming years and evaluate whether the solutions that you are considering will support your needs and align with your budget. For example, you may be planning to manufacture a new product line, add a service’s arm, or add new on-line sales channels. Will the systems that you are evaluating enable you to support these initiatives as you roll them out?
Outcome: Examine your growth strategy over the next several years and identify how your prospective solutions will or will not allow you make adjustments as you evolve.
Asking the right questions will lead you to the right answers when it comes to identifying the best fit for your company’s needs. Which factors are most important to your decision? Share your comments below.
