If you are managing a growing business, you will almost certainly hit some bumps in the road when it comes to your IT systems keeping up with your evolving needs. One of the fist systems to show signs of strain tends to be your accounting software.
You're probably stretching your current system as far are you can, with a few workarounds added in for good measure. It's very common for businesses to put off changing finance systems because of concerns around time, budget and complexity. However, at some point you must make the change and doing so could save your business time and money.
Entry level systems such as QuickBooks are great for startups and small businesses, but they cannot keep up with the additional requirements of a growing businesses. As specialists in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central we talk to businesses in this situation every day and we have curated a list of 5 of the most common signs we see that indicate that a business has outgrown its current finance system.
If you recognise these signs, it is probably time to start researching options for your next finance system. One option you should consider is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. It is a scalable solution designed specifically for small businesses that you can add functionality to over time, meaning it should be the last accounting system you ever need.
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Reporting struggles
Reporting options in entry-level systems can be basic, and often require data exports to Excel for analysis. As your business grows, manual data processing becomes less feasible and data requirements more complex.
How Business Central can help: There is no need to export datasets from multiple sources - Microsoft Power BI can directly pull data from your finance system and databases, map relationships between systems and display the data live to users. The process is completely automatic, with no need for manual intervention.
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Audit requirements
As your business expands, so too do audit requirements every year. Entry-level finance systems can struggle to fulfil some of these reports and result in a lot of manual intervention.
How Business Central can help: There is a complete audit trail with a full transactional history including date, time and user stamps. This means when something is posted, approved, or even changed, you can track it back to its origin with ease. This also includes uploading and linking to original documents too, such as vendor invoices.
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Multi-company requirements
As your business continues to grow, so does your database. When your system starts lagging because of the number of transactions that you do in a day, this is another sign that you should be looking for a system that has better data capacity and more reliable performance.
How Business Central can help: As a cloud-based solution, Business Central is hosted on Azure - Microsoft's cloud platform. Azure offers best-in-class solutions with no ongoing maintenance for physical database space or transaction limitations.
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Data overload
You're expanding your operations and now have more than one legal entity and transact in multiple currencies. This can lead to multiple spreadsheets to help calculate these transactions and manually bring them into the system, which is not only time consuming, but opens the door to potential errors.
How Business Central can help: Out-of-the-box, Business Central is a multi-company environment facilitating regional functionality that can handle localized tax and reporting. Intercompany and consolidation capabilities also support group tasks and requirements to give you total visibility of your organization. Business Central also supports over 30 languages and additional capabilities that can be turned on as your business grows.
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Integration challenges
Entry-level finance systems are often independent products that don't integrate with your company's other systems or software. This means that over time, too much information ends up sitting in someone's desktop or inbox, making it difficult to research historical transactions.
How Business Central can help: As a Microsoft product, Business Central seamlessly integrates with Outlook, Excel, Word and Teams – meaning collaboration is effortless with tools that your staff already know how to use.
If any of these signs sound familiar to you, then it is probably time to start thinking about moving to your next finance system. Launchpad for Business Central offers small businesses the opportunity to get setup on Business Central without the high time and budgets normally associated with similar finance solutions. Using our self-guided setup with access to trained consultants throughout, you can get started on your own terms and in your own time.
