Outgrown QuickBooks? How Does A Family Office Know?

• By zoltan-szakal
• November 15, 2018

Have we outgrown QuickBooks?

When did we cross that line?

How could we not have known?

Indeed, how does an organization know when it has outgrown QuickBooks?  Quite frankly, these are not the right questions to ask.  Realistically by the time an organization outgrows QuickBooks, while still using it, the damage may already have been done.

Here are just some of the things that may have already happened.

• Growth may have been impeded by creating a bottleneck in the finance department.
• Missed key reporting indicators that could have set the firm on the best possible course.
• Failed to take advantage of key opportunities because the information came in too late, or not at all.
• Passed up potential investors because the organization could not provide the kind of transparency today’s investors demand.

The real question is…

How do you know when you are going to outgrow QuickBooks?

With growth comes the need to get more complex data than QuickBooks is readily able to handle.  When using QuickBooks to get at the analysis any organization’s growth demands, spreadsheets become a given.  In a QuickBooks environment spreadsheets must be used in order to manually merge and manipulate financial data with operational information.  As the reliance on manual processes grows it can have the effect of slowing the financial team to a crawl. A great example of this is taking days or even weeks to close financial periods.  In this environment many finance teams are engaged in managing rows and columns instead of value add tasks that can drive growth.  Above all, with better automation, the organization can gain control over processes and data to ensure an accurate single source of truth.

All organizations try to stay the course on what is best for them.  The fact is that the “course” can be very difficult to identify, and then navigate, with incomplete or out of date reports.  As complexity is added within an organization, such as additional entities, it needs the right system to make the right choices.  As the rate of growth increases, the ability to gather the right data from across the organization and access it in real time can pay big dividends.  Many opportunities are available only during a brief window, QuickBooks doesn’t readily offer up the information needed to take advantage of those opportunities.  Responding to an opportunity often requires a combination of financial and operational reporting that just isn’t part of QuickBooks.

Be aware of the signs and avoid the potential damage.  If you believe you are on a path to outgrow QuickBooks, click here, to learn more.

With the accelerated pace of growth in today’s business world, organizations require a level of insight that allows a deep dive into its key metrics…in real time.  And there must be a clear auditable path from financial reports back to the very transactions upon which they are based.

Read about Life After QuickBooks.  Yes it gets better!