Your mid-market business has outgrown its business management software—should you upgrade to QuickBooks Online Advanced or a traditional ERP system? This breakdown of the features, benefits and costs will help you to make the right decision for your future and continuing growth.
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Growing a business
QuickBooks Online Advanced or a Traditional ERP? Here’s What You Need to Know
Streamlined financial management
QuickBooks Online Advanced was designed to simplify financial management for mid-sized businesses. The powerful software makes it easy to track income and expenses, manage invoices and generate financial reports. Traditional ERPs tend to target larger enterprises with complex advanced features, which can be very distracting if you don’t need this level of specialization.
When a professional services firm grew tired of struggling with the complexity of a traditional ERP, they decided to switch QuickBooks Online Advanced. They reported a noticeable decrease in administrative tasks and also saw greater collaboration within their team. As everyone now had more time to focus on clients and strategic initiatives, an uplift in customer service contributed to an increase in their revenue.
Real-time inventory
Real-time updates, clear dashboards and custom reports make it easy to track your inventory with QuickBooks Online Advanced. Built-in forecasting tools also help you to make smarter business decisions. With a traditional ERP, similar functions often require extensive setup and configuration, leading to longer implementation times and increased costs.
Customized reporting
With QuickBooks Online Advanced you can tailor reports to your operational and strategic needs by customizing cash flow summaries, profitability tracking and up to 12 fields across transactions. You can also integrate Excel integration for deeper analysis. As with other traditional ERP features, reporting meets the needs of large enterprises. Your teams could waste a great deal of time learning how to navigate complex and, ultimately, unhelpful tools.
Implementation time
When a business owner is planning a software upgrade, one of their biggest concerns is how long the whole process will take. With QuickBooks Online Advanced you can be up and running within days, or even hours, compared with weeks or months it takes to install a traditional ERP. And, while traditional ERP systems are notorious for their steep learning curve, QuickBooks Online Advanced is designed for employees with varying levels of technical expertise to use with minimal training.
A mid-sized manufacturing company that switched from a traditional ERP system was amazed by the speed and ease of the transition—they were using the software within weeks. They also found the intuitive interface of QuickBooks Online Advanced led to higher user satisfaction and engagement, which improved their operational efficiency.
The total cost of ownership
You can expect to pay an upfront five or six figure licensing fee for a traditional ERP system. Extra costs can include consulting, implementation, annual maintenance and infrastructure such as servers, networking, backups and dedicated IT staff.
Compare this with a monthly subscription fee for QuickBooks Online Advanced, including maintenance and updates. Faster implementation, less training and on-hand support reduce costs even further so you’ll see a return on your investment much sooner.
