Introduction
Your business has grown substantially and quickly. To maintain your pace of growth and create a strong foundation for future growth, you need to adapt to a solution that provides greater efficiencies right now, along with the flexibility to scale in the future.
Many business owners in your position use myriad solutions, from spreadsheets to QuickBooks and are looking for a future-ready solution that can accommodate their growing and increasingly complex needs.
In this article we compare Intuit QuickBooks solutions (including QuickBooks Enterprise and QuickBooks Online Advanced), which serve growing small businesses, with a popular full-scale enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, Microsoft Dynamics, to evaluate their functions and features for different kinds of businesses.
Intuit QuickBooks Enterprise and Quickbooks Online Advanced: Background
QuickBooks help users manage their business transactions effectively and also save time and effort by conglomerating daily financial processes and functions into a streamlined, easy-to-use interface.
QuickBooks Enterprise is an integrated solution designed for growing, product-based businesses that helps users streamline business and financial operations management. It bundles key functionality and lets business owners add and customize capabilities as they grow. QuickBooks Enterprise integrates with other leading point solutions like Salesforce to create a connected back-office experience, instead of a traditional “one-stop shop” ERP solution.
QuickBooks Online Advanced is a solution designed for growing small businesses that also helps users streamline business and financial operations management.It’s offered at a different price point than Enterprise, but it shares some of the same features, including integration with Salesforce and more than 600 powerful apps.*
Microsoft Dynamics: Background
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a cloud-based portfolio of Microsoft products that can be connected within the same ecosystem and augmented with customization. Microsoft Dynamics applications can be integrated with familiar and already entrenched Microsoft Office products, as well as organization-specific applications built with Microsoft Azure. It can be further extended into the Internet of Things and augmented reality workflows.
Already configured modules in Microsoft Dynamics 365 include applications designed to streamline and automate sales, marketing, field service, customer service, commerce, operations, and finance. Additionally, Microsoft Dynamics modules can be connected to, and integrated with, existing systems.
At the highest level, there are two main Dynamics 365 solutions to choose from: Business Central and Finance & Operations.
Dynamics 365 Business Central is an ERP-like solution suited for most small and medium-sized businesses.
Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations is an ERP-like solution suited for large or diversified companies. It is often used by companies with multiple lines of business, diversified geographies, or complex product development needs.
These iterations have replaced older versions of Dynamics, namely Dynamics GP (Great Plains) and Dynamics NAV.
Overview
QuickBooks vs. Microsoft Dynamics for growing small businesses
QuickBooks is a portfolio of scalable financial and business management solutions with an intuitive interface. With two core offerings, QuickBooks Online Advanced and QuickBooks Enterprise, and the ability for users to customize their software to meet their unique needs, QuickBooks can be configured to fit the needs of growing businesses.
Microsoft Dynamics is a suite of business-ready applications designed to work with the Microsoft 365 suite of Office applications and with unique business applications—both those created in Microsoft Azure and those produced by third parties. Customers can select which of the modules they want to create upfront and add more later as needed. Out of the various Microsoft Dynamics offerings, Dynamics 365 Business Central is the most appropriate for smaller or medium-sized businesses.
