7 alarm bells you’ve outgrown your business accounting system
Most businesses in the past have made the decision to invest in a business accounting system. Whether it was 5, 10 or even longer years ago, this was considered to be a large investment. Financial information and your accounting software, either managed by yourself, through an accountant or bookkeeper, was the core of your business.
But as your business grows, are your needs becoming more complex to accommodate the ever-changing market savvy environment? Are simple additional applications like Excel for spreadsheets, Outlook for calendar to manage contacts becoming cumbersome? Do you feel your accounting software is struggling to keep up and holding you back?
If this is you, here are the seven signs it’s time to change:
1. Increased manual activities and paperwork
Are your employees spending too much time entering data twice and sorting through paperwork? This starts distracting you from growing your business as more customer relationships and employees end up equating to increased re-keying of data into the accounting software.
2. Lack of data integration
Do you need to call specific people within your organisation to obtain information? This is a big issue when your business accounting system doesn’t integrate and managers can’t see across the organisation’s operations. Your accounting software needs to give you a much needed 360’ view of your accounts, warehouse, inventory, payroll and CRM.
3. Limited customer relationships
Are you finding your customer relationships and experiences need to evolve to include marketing and online sales? eCommerce sites with live product information and sales from websites have to connect to a centralised customer database. Accounting software isn’t as complex as an ERP system to handle your finances, purchasing, inventory, sales and marketing in one.
4. Limited mobile capabilities
Can your employees access your business accounting system offline? Working 9-5 in the office has changed, the demand for mobile capabilities to do the job anywhere, anytime, on any device is becoming more prevalent.
5. Inadequate reporting
Is the template-based reporting functionality limiting? Are you creating reports in Excel to generate them the way you would like? As a business grows the need emerges for sophisticated, comprehensive, customisable and easy to interpret reports that show what’s impacting your business.
6. Working outside your system
Is more and more accounting work occurring in Excel or other applications than your business accounting system? Accessing other systems to see your financial data and information, or to do your job, is not putting your time to best use.
7. Performance issues
Is your system software or hardware not the latest upgrade and providing sluggish performance? Heavier demands resulting from increased data and users makes the system slow and can result in corrupt or frozen data during processing.
Integration is a critical component in getting the most out of your ERP system. When there is a strong integration between different areas of your business, errors can be reduced, productivity increased, and your ERP can generate more timely and accurate information for management.
Click here for a demo or to contact one of our friendly consultants.
