Outgrowing quickbooks: research shows quickbooks isn’t keeping pace

As a low-entry bookkeeping tool, QuickBooks meets the needs of many organizations, but pressures facing finance departments put that effectiveness to the test. A newly released report shows there are key issues organizations face today using QuickBooks and signs these organizations are outgrowing QuickBooks.

Outgrowing QuickBooks: Frustrations and Limitations

The new report, How QuickBooks isn’t Keeping Pace with CFO Needs, looks at a survey of 164 financial executives. It finds that a full three-out-of-four finance executives (75%) say going back-and-forth between current software products and spreadsheets is a source of frustration to their financial teams. Finance executives use these spreadsheets to get the information and reporting they need in their daily work, which points out a major shortcoming in QuickBooks reporting.

In addition, these survey respondents note additional QuickBooks challenges, including:

• Data accessibility issues (29%)
• High occurrence of imbalances/troubleshooting (27%)
• Too much manual data entry and reentry (26%)
• Upgrades/maintenance (26%)

Using QuickBooks, the monthly close is a time-consuming endeavor. Almost nine-out-of-ten financial executives (88%) report it takes up to 14 days to complete the financial close every month. Challenges to the process abound – The three areas financial executives see as the biggest obstacles in the monthly financial close are data inaccuracies (17%), the impact of reconciliation and investigations (15%) and technology limitations (14%).

Embracing a solution capable of a continuous close, as well as one with state-of-the-art collaboration tools for enhancing data accessibility, makes finance more strategically valuable to the organization. That result is can’t be achieved using QuickBooks.

Outgrowing QuickBooks: Considering New Solutions

CFOs can’t afford to let spreadsheet-based processes and monthly-close bottlenecks slow their teams down. Their challenges with outgrowing QuickBooks come when CFOs must make strategic contributions to the business. Almost three-out-of-ten financial executives (29%) report the main pressure finance departments or CFOs is the increased expectation to provide insights to the C-suite. Another top pressure includes increased expectation to work across silos and collaborate with other departments (23%).

As they face these pressures, CFOs recognize that they have a lot of runway for process improvement and transformation. When asked what would most benefit the finance function, nearly one-out-of-four financial executives (23%) say greater flexibility to adapt current finance solutions, followed by minimizing the need to go back-and-forth between financial software and spreadsheets (18%), deeper insights via reporting and dashboards (18%), and achieving faster access to reports and insights (17%).

Given these findings, it’s no wonder 37% of financial executives are actively considering switching to a solution other than QuickBooks or QuickBooks Online.

There are usually certain triggers that signal companies are outgrowing QuickBooks and move to a robust, modern cloud-native solution. These include:

• Spending too much time in spreadsheets
• Multiple business entities with no consolidated charts of accounts
• Seeking outside investment that would require you to be GAAP compliant
• Remote data access requirements

When asked what barriers finance leader face in adopting new technologies, 31.5% cite budget constraints. There’s certainly additional cost in moving from a bookkeeping application such as QuickBooks, but QuickBooks has hidden costs that executive should consider. QuickBooks simply wasn’t designed to provide professional financial management capabilities to growing organizations with sophisticated, evolving demands that require more and better visibility into financial and operational performance—such as automating key processes, providing anytime, anywhere access, enforcing internal controls, customizing functionality, and integrating with other critical applications.

How QuickBooks Isn’t Keeping Pace with CFO Needs expounds on the current state for CFOs using QuickBooks and why the product is less equipped for the future of finance than CFOs may think.