Evaluating QuickBooks vs. Sage Intacct for Scaling Businesses

Due to its immense popularity, most finance professionals have worked with QuickBooks in one way or another. QuickBooks is often the go-to choice to support the accounting function for start-ups and small businesses. While it handles accounting well, some evolving organizations come to realize they need more or different capabilities from their software.

With a close eye on budgets, switching platforms is sometimes the last task on your expansive to-do list. But considering your options and potentially changing to a platform that better meets your needs as your business scales is never a waste of your resources.

Is QuickBooks Growing Well with Your Organization?

QuickBooks satisfies the accounting needs of an organization early in its life cycle. However, as businesses grow and mature, they might require a system that supports their operations differently.

Business leaders want specific information, metrics, and approaches to business functions, and they also want to minimize any restrictions that inhibit their ability to scale. System support for multiple entities, automation of critical processes, strong internal controls, and preservation of large data sets are non-negotiable when you’re scaling a business. Do QuickBooks’ capabilities align with these needs for your business?

Is Reporting in QuickBooks Working for Your Team?

While system end-users may favor the straightforward reporting features of QuickBooks for their ease of use, the multifaceted information needed by organizational leadership often requires additional and manual work. Recurring information requests may create a disjointed chart of accounts and a class structure that is difficult to maintain and report from.

With the addition of multiple QuickBooks company files, the process of performing manual consolidations ensues. QuickBooks reporting limitations typically translate to exporting, manipulating, and formatting data in another well-known tool: Excel. The evolving demands of growing organizations require more and better financial and operational performance visibility, and turning to Excel can lead to errors and loss of clarity.

Are You Leaning on Manual Data Entry?

Organizations using QuickBooks, especially the Desktop version, sometimes operate in silos. It’s common to rely on many manual data entry points between other systems to support cross-functional teams. Manual data entry might be okay when data volumes are smaller, but it can be a drain as the business grows. Team members research, re-enter, and verify data already captured elsewhere. This also makes it trickier to gain visibility across the organization.

Organizations with advanced accounting requirements, such as allocations, revenue recognition, and job costing, sometimes find the need to develop manual workarounds because they’re unsure if QuickBooks provides built-in capabilities for these processes.

Unfortunately, these workarounds only increase the probability of duplication of efforts and make it difficult to gain an integrated, real-time financial view of a business’s end-to-end operations. Lack of cross-team information sharing, inadequate data controls, and integration can all delay strategic decision-making and obstruct growth-oriented business management.

Choose the Software that Scales Your Business

The decision to move from QuickBooks to a solution that can be more scalable for organizations focused on growth does not have to be complicated. Cloud-based financial management solutions offer the tools to help your team work strategically through the financial data needed to plan and make important financial decisions, and the insights necessary to fuel growth.

Many organizations have already made the decision to replace QuickBooks with cloud-based financial systems like Sage Intacct. As a result, these teams have experienced better visibility, enhanced flexibility, more effective process management, and the long-term cost savings needed to sustain their maturing business.