NetSuite vs QuickBooks: Why You Should Upgrade to the #1 ERP

QuickBooks is a great solution for small businesses, but it doesn’t exactly scale with your business. QuickBooks can be compared to getting your first bicycle. You’re young and excited because you can be more independent and it can help you get to nearby places like a friend’s house or school, etc.

As you get older, your needs change, and the bicycle can become less useful. You can’t really ride it in the rain or snow, it’s difficult to transport groceries or shopping bags, and only one person can ride on it comfortably, so that means no passengers.

Eventually, you need a better form of transportation. You need a car or a truck. For businesses, NetSuite is that upgraded form of transportation, which allows you to personalize and customize it to the way you do business.

In this blog, we’ll examine the benefits of upgrading from QuickBooks to NetSuite ERP.

QuickBooks Limits Growth Potential

Out of the gate, QuickBooks proves it can be a speed bump to your company’s growth. QuickBooks Advanced, its top tier online option, has a limit of 25 billable users and 3 accountants. Its other levels, Simple Start, Essentials, and Plus have much lower user limits, and the company started imposing usage limits at the start of 2019. Unless you sign up for the Advanced tier, your company will be limited to 250 chart of accounts, which is one of the many sources of contention in the QuickBooks online forum.

NetSuite is completely scalable and supports any number of users. As a NetSuite Solution Provider, SuiteCentric can offer competitive pricing and free NetSuite demos, so please let us know if you have any questions.

Multi-entity accounting presents another challenge as QuickBooks allows only one company per subscription. This introduces complications for growing companies that want to create subsidiaries, or execute acquisitions or mergers, etc. If a company decides to purchase a new subscription for a different entity, all data and transactions will have to be manually exported from each account and stored in Excel for a company-wide view of financials. Data silos and manual processes can stifle growth and are common with QuickBooks.

NetSuite OneWorld provides companies with multi-entity accounting solutions to help manage financial consolidation, and receive complete visibility across the entire business in real-time. This NetSuite module supports subsidiaries, regions, and separate legal entities with the same parent company. Companies can easily manage multiple legal entities with different reporting requirements, currencies, taxation rules, and more from a single NetSuite account.

Data Silos and Manual Processes with QuickBooks

In QuickBooks, data is easily siloed because there are standard processes that require manual updates and leveraging Excel spreadsheets. For example, calculating fixed asset management is more complicated because you have to calculate depreciation expenses outside of the software and record it in a journal entry. Additionally, sales tax tracking is a manual process that must be set up and can be a compliance risk.

QuickBooks also requires a variety of apps to execute seemingly normal business processes such as payroll and time tracking. These apps could be great and useful, but each necessitates separate updates and dedicated support. There are also software patches and potential security vulnerabilities that come with managing a variety of apps. Often times, these require double maintenance of master data.

With NetSuite, all data resides in a single location within the cloud, and silos are eliminated because of the natural integrations with other key systems such as CRM, ecommerce, inventory, etc. Customers can access a single version of the truth across all business functions in real-time, and all of this information is available via one secure interface.

Automation is another important element to running a modern business as it eliminates manual processes and can free up time to focus on more mission-critical tasks. NetSuite has broad automation capabilities that span from Bid-to-Bill processes and customized workflows to highly targeted marketing campaigns and order fulfillment. Additionally, it boasts automated tax compliance in more than 100 countries, which can save a company from hours of headaches if it is thinking of expanding internationally.

Regarding IT maintenance, NetSuite is a fully integrated business software system, and it manages upgrades and releases for its customers. This means that all customizations are carried forward with each upgrade, and security patches are already applied, simplifying the maintenance process.

Audit Trail and Reporting Limitations with QuickBooks

QuickBooks has limited permissions settings for users, and this can present challenges for the audit trail. Permissions are set according to individual users and not by their role, so companies must be diligent when deciding the level of access afforded to employees. Some companies have voiced concerns about security risks with this setup because it is possible for a user to edit invoices in any account, even accounts to which they are not assigned.

The demands for reporting become more complex as companies evolve or grow, and QuickBooks customers are forced to seek out third-party solutions or apps to help manage everything. For example, consolidated reports on subsidiary and parent companies are not possible in QuickBooks without leveraging an authorized third-party app. This means another party has access to sensitive company data and must be trusted to maintain proper security protocols and patches.

QuickBooks Advanced Reporting provides a variety of reporting options, but it is limited to an on-premise solution called QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise. For online customers, its three subscriptions include tiered reporting options, and some useful reports like Budget vs. Accruals and Open Purchase Order List are limited to the highest tier.

NetSuite delivers a robust audit trail that is always on, and the system’s role-based permissions settings can help streamline the overall audit process. Default role-based permissions can be set, and individual user access settings can also be changed as needed to minimize security risks. Companies using NetSuite can easily report on audit trails by leveraging saved searches to focus on specific record types, sorting, filtering, and better monitoring of all high-risk data points.

For example, you can have alerts and email notifications scheduled based on preset criteria such as when a check is written over a dollar threshold.

Reporting capabilities in NetSuite are about as comprehensive as it gets. As a fully integrated solution, it provides a complete view of the entire business, and companies can choose from a wide variety of out-of-the-box reports or customize reports based on specific business requirements. The library of reports includes profit and loss, budget vs actual, cash flow, revenue forecasting, parent and subsidiary reports, along with many others.

Additionally, NetSuite’s Financial Report Builder tool equips companies with the power to design custom financial statements and reports. This includes adding budget details or grouping financial data by classification instead of account, for example. NetSuite also provides a host of report layouts and presentation formats that can be augmented to satisfy the requests of different stakeholders. With NetSuite, companies also receive global support for internationalization and localization.