There are a number of entry level accounting software options with reporting, budgeting and planning functionality. Among these, QuickBooks is the leader of the pack and offers easy to use functionality and accurate accounting tools, but for businesses with rapid growth plans or those who have already outgrown QuickBooks, software requirements become more complex. All of that complexity means choosing the right accounting solution is a little more difficult.
If you are looking for a solution that goes beyond entry level accounting software solutions, your first step should be to assess the needs of you company. Typically this discussion revolves around cost requirements, technical requirements and accounting requirements. You can learn more about why businesses choose Microsoft Dynamics Cloud here.
But it’s also important to remember that choosing the best online financial software for your small business requires an understanding of your company’s culture, processes and goals.
Culture:
“Knowing the importance of company culture and its effect on employee productivity, it’s clear that all IT decisions should closely align with company’s culture,” said a recent article from CloudTweaks.com.
“The best way to introduce new solutions is to target influential teams to test the product or solution under a trial period.”
Financial software trails online will allow IT leaders to determine weather or no the software works with the overall personality of the business and that the workforce will be enthusiastic about using the solution. When you are able to achieve this, your new solution will be able to boost employee productivity, collaboration and ultimately profitability.
Processes:
Generally speaking any new technology implementation is inherently going change processes, but one can limit the culture shock of a new solution by understanding existing processes across departments and finding a solution that best fits with these. Will the software you are choosing work with other applications used by employees such as Outlook, MS Word, Excel and social media for collaboration? Do your employees use desktops as a primary workstation and how much of their processes are performed from laptops and other mobile devices? A solution that supports multiple devices and works with common applications in your offices will help to ensure that processes are running at peak efficiency.
It’s also important to understand where your processes are manual, redundant or lack efficiency and whether or not the software you are choosing will improve these through automated workflows and connections between offices, lines of business and applications.
Goals:
Understanding the long term growth plans of your business is critical. When it comes to mission critical applications like online financial software the solution should be able to serve your business for a minimum of five years, but preferably will last a decade or more. Does your company plan to go public, scale up production or move into new lines of business? If so you need to know what you will need in a software solution in order to help achieve those goals. Does the solution you are considering scale easily? Does it move easily from the cloud to on-premises or hybrid? Does the cloud services provider deliver compliance support, and compliance ready cloud environments with maintenance and updates included so that the solution is update?
Choosing the best online financial software for small businesses requires a lot of due diligence and will ultimately play a critical role in the company’s ability to grow and improve profitability for years to come. Do not make the mistake of only focusing on the technical and accounting requirements, and keep culture, processes and goals at the front of your mind when choosing online financial software.
Check out this chart to compare Dynamics GP in the cloud to QuickBooks or choose a free trial option to let your organization’s leaders see the cloud in action for a 30 days.
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