Netsuite vs. Quickbooks - Which should you choose for your growing business?

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As your company expands, you need an accounting solution that can keep up with the speed of growth.

Quickbooks is often a viable solution for a company starting out, in fact 85.1% of small businesses use quickbooks for their accounting, but as your business continues to grow, your complexities grow with you. 

When your business’s growth results in more intricate accounting, it’s important to implement a solution that is able to carry the weight of growing complexities.

Your digital landscape should match the pace of your business, not become a burden that slows expansion.

Make the switch to a solution that can scale as your company continues to grow.

NetSuite is a solution that is ideal for all business sizes because of its powerful scalability.

Quickbooks and NetSuite are both accounting solutions but NetSuite has many more features and capabilities. Some of these capabilities include a central view of financial, operational, and business data that can be shared across the business in real-time, not to mention many other functions.

If you’re a smaller company and have been considering upgrading your accounting solution, it's important to choose a solution with your future business in mind. Switching to a solution with the capabilities you will need down the road reduces the time and cost it takes to upgrade later. It also allows your employees to familiarize themselves with the solution and best practices for their role in the platform.

Companies that don’t choose a solution with growth in mind often run into scalability issues, including performance issues like slow processing times and system crashes. A solution like QuickBooks that has limited data storage and reporting can quickly compromise data integrity and accuracy, and make it difficult to generate reports.

Here’s an overview of QuickBooks:

  • Ideal for smaller sized businesses: QuickBooks is ideal for smaller sized businesses that have the intention of staying small. As long as your business plans to remain at a low level of customers processed, employees hired, and data processed, your business will not outgrow QuickBooks. 
  • Accommodates simple bookkeeping functions: Quickbooks has simple bookkeeping functions like managing invoices, paying bills, and basic cash flow tracking. If your business is small with a singular location, this may be all of the functionality your business needs. When the organization’s complexities grow, QuickBooks will no longer be able to accommodate your financial needs.
  • Can handle minimal accounting demands: QuickBooks is limited solely to accounting, and can handle simple demands. If accounting becomes more complex, you will most likely have to export spreadsheets and look at data in third party platforms. This means that spreadsheets become disconnected, hard to find, and the only way to interpret or view them is to use a third party platform.

A Look at NetSuite:

  • Ideal for businesses at every stage : NetSuite is ideal for businesses at every stage. Whether at the beginning stage of growth, or a mature organization with complex billing and financial activity, this ERP can meet you where your organization currently is. NetSuite will help you prepare for growth at every stage of your organization. 
  • Real-time visibility into billing and financial activity: NetSuite provides real-time data with customizable fields to make sure your organization is able to track the data that matters the most to you. NetSuite also offers role-based dashboards with personalized views that can display key performance indicators, reports, and metrics that are relevant to specific roles at your organization. 
  • Automated renewals for subscription payments: NetSuite handles automated renewals for subscription payments which helps to regulate revenue predictability, which is particularly important in subscription-based businesses. Automated renewals help your business with accurate financial planning and forecasting.
  • Multiple subscription billing options: NetSuite offers multiple subscription billing options instead of one singular availability. These options include fixed rate, consumption-based or a combination of the two. NetSuite’s automations ensure that your revenue forecasting is accurate and you can rely on recurring revenue.

Quickbooks Vs. NetSuite:

QuickBooks is primarily an accounting solution, while NetSuite is a comprehensive ERP that integrates with the entire business, including customer relationship management (CRM), inventory management, and eCommerce capabilities. 

NetSuite allows your organization to get real-time insight into financial and billing activity so that you can gain relevant, timely insights. NetSuite also controls the data and functions users have access through role and user-based permissions. 

QuickBooks, on the other hand, has limited user roles, which include primary admin, company admin, and standard user. Within these roles, there is no option to segment duties or create a full personalized dashboard for specific roles. This prevents you from having full control over your dashboard. QuickBooks has a one-size-fits-all view for the users at your company. 

QuickBooks has very limited data analysis and reporting while NetSuite offers a comprehensive view and up-to-the-minute reporting.

NetSuite is a great scalable solution that has the capacity to grow with your business, while QuickBooks’ bandwidth is limited to small businesses. If you’re an organization with room for growth, you’d soon have to switch from QuickBooks to another solution down the line. On the other hand, NetSuite scales with your business, saving you the time, effort, and cost of switching to another solution. 

QuickBooks and NetSuite are both accounting solutions, but NetSuite is much more comprehensive. NetSuite includes CRM, inventory management, and eCommerce capabilities, while QuickBooks is limited to accounting. 

Conclusion

NetSuite can keep up with the complexities of midsize to large businesses. But that doesn’t mean small businesses should overlook it, either. By choosing NetSuite as a budding organization, you keep future growth in mind and eliminate the need to later migrate to the solution. 

At Para, we’re tech consulting experts. Our firm is small enough to truly care and skilled enough to have the best experts on hand. If you’re considering a NetSuite implementation, we offer a free initial consultation to see if NetSuite is the right fit for your organization. Simply follow the link to claim a free consultation and fast track your journey to success.

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