Five signs you’ve outgrown your accounting platform

You can’t afford to have your business and your accounting platform creaking along when others are flying at on-demand speed.

Some businesses find they’ve outgrown their accounting platform simply because their business and financial needs have become too complex. Or they are exceeding the monthly recommended transaction limits. Others find their patchwork of systems is becoming overwhelmed by the demands of today’s business environment for instant response and real-time information.

These are five signs to spot if your business has reached the limits of your existing accounting platform.

1. It’s too hard to find out what’s going on in the business

Most traditional business software was designed for a time when you could afford to wait until the end of the month to get the data you need. That’s not the case today, when consolidated views and real-time reporting can make the difference between thriving and barely surviving.

As soon as the business expands, or takes on new locations, the information that has to be exchanged rapidly swells out of control. You suddenly have data buried in systems across your organisation, making it difficult to find the information you need when you need it.

2. You spend too much time re-entering and reconciling data

With earlier generations of enterprise applications, it used to make sense to have different systems for separate departments. But when everyone is networked and online, it’s frustrating that suppliers, customers and business managers have to wait for answers while information is transferred between systems by hand or manually consolidated into spreadsheets.

There’s no real-time visibility from one system to another. Incompatibilities and imperfect integration can leave employees tied up, copying data between systems or trying to interpret information to be able to make business decisions. This is often tedious and time-consuming work that could be completed faster and more accurately with the right technology.

3. You’re losing sales

When orders came into a single office location by phone, email or even fax, most small businesses could get by without a fully automated system. As a business adds more sales and office team members and introduces new sales channels, such as eCommerce capabilities, it becomes increasingly hard to manage without the right systems in place. Today, it’s the expected norm to have stock levels, order status and delivery tracking all online, with customers able to check on their orders from a web page. Sales people are expected to have all the latest information on hand even when on the road. You can’t afford to have your business creaking along when others are flying at on-demand speed.

4. You’re doing more accounting tasks outside of your system than in it

Most accounting programs were designed to automate a limited set of core accounting functions, which means they limit how you run your operation when you want to do more or respond to changes. Quite often, you’re adapting your business to fit the application, rather than vice versa.

As a result, you find new financial reporting systems, custom applications and spreadsheets springing up outside of your core accounting platform.

5. You spend too much time worrying about technology

With each new layer of business software you add, the underlying systems infrastructure becomes more inflexible. Those earlier investments in underlying hardware and software are costly to maintain and yet still fail to keep pace with the rapid pace of technology innovation.

New generation on-demand cloud business systems are built from the ground up for flexibility and agility, without the overhead of worrying about maintaining the underlying technology. They’re designed to stay up-to-date with the state-of-the-art in business automation, giving you the tools to keep ahead of the competition and be ready to seize new opportunities as they emerge.

Stephen Canning, CEO, JCurve Solutions