Competitor Analysis: NetSuite vs Quickbooks

As part of our comparison series, today we take a closer look at QuickBooks, and compare its features and capabilities to NetSuite. Rather than do a straight comparison, we will be focusing on the triggers that indicate QuickBooks is limiting your growth and answer the question: Where do you go once you outgrow Quickbooks? Hint, the answer is NetSuite.

What is Quickbooks

QuickBooks is a popular financial software for small businesses. Upwards of 5 million businesses use it to send invoices, organise expenses and manage their cash flow. It’s a great starter accounting solution.

What is NetSuite

NetSuite is an ERP system offering a suite of cloud-based applications. 24,000 fast-growing businesses across the world use it to run key back-office operations, financial business processes, HR, professional services automation and omni channel commerce.

Business growth enablement

For many growing businesses, it is vital that their financial system streamlines and regulates operations across locations, enables accelerated time to market and supports increased transactional volume without adding headcount. Because of this, it is inevitable that every business will eventually outgrow their starter accounting system and need to transition to a solution with more flex and power.

This is certainly the case when it comes to QuickBooks. Following business growth, QuickBooks’ limited capabilities quickly make the software redundant. In a bid to gain the missing functionalities, the temptation to add disparate systems and applications is strong. But this only serves to complicate your system ecosystem and prevent your organisation from being agile and responsive. 

NetSuite, on the other hand, has long been the backbone of many growing businesses across all industries and geographies, and is flexible enough to guide businesses through their many different phases of development.

If your business is experiencing growth and currently using QuickBooks, it’s likely you have an increasing awareness that QuickBooks is limiting your business. If this is you, read on to learn how Quickbooks compares to NetSuite, and why switching to NetSuite is a better way forward.

Signs you’ve outgrown Quickbooks

Poor data visibility and insights

QuickBooks was made for a time when a business was able to wait until the end of the month to gather their data and send out reports. Today, businesses run very differently. To remain agile, they need consolidated views and up-to-the-minute reporting at all times.

And yes, while small teams at one location may be able to get by without a fully automated system new locations or business expansion makes the exchange of key information tricky particularly as data tends to be buried in QuickBooks or hidden in all the fragmented add-on systems that have been deployed to plug the software’s functionality gaps. Consequently employees start to rely on spreadsheets, reports are error prone out- of- date and take too long to run, and getting a comprehensive view across all business units is almost impossible.

On the other hand, NetSuite is purpose-built to allow the quick and efficient generation and compilation of a huge volume of financial and non-financial information, ensuring all stakeholders have access to the information they need when they need it. Through the implementation of user rRoles, NetSuite delivers functionality appropriate to an individual’s responsibilities, ensuring each of your employees can log into NetSuite, get key information at a glance and know exactly what actions they need to take.

Limited accounting options

QuickBooks has a limited set of core accounting functions which prevent businesses from running operations the way they want. Instead, processes have to be adapted around the application. This creates problems as customers, vendors, or inventory items increases. Scaling at speed is the key to business growth and success, but without audit trails, real-time business planning and reporting, stronger financial controls, smart SKU management and automated processes, QuickBooks fails to keep up. This is when finance staff start to create workarounds and fixes using Excel and other software packages to overcome QuickBooks’ shortfalls, adding to the all-too-common application hairball.

Alternatively, NetSuite delivers powerful and all-encompassing accounting functionality, including reliable and timely information, automated global financial consolidation and automated processes that remove the need for manual invoice processing and other repetitive tasks. Plus, it’s customisable to meet the specific needs of an organisation and the individual roles within them. 

Technology becomes a bottleneck

QuickBooks often requires businesses to add a new piece of software to their environment to make up for missing functions. This makes the underlying infrastructure more complicated, inflexible and costly to maintain. 

With NetSuite, businesses get a cloud-based, on-demand business system built from the ground up for flexibility and agility. The software continually updates and comes with smart automation, ensuring your business can move fast. If required, NetSuite integrates with thousands of apps to keep functionality and data unified at all times.

Move to NetSuite

NetSuite’s integrated suite of cloud-based solutions delivers efficient and effective business operations that will support, not thwart, the growth of your business.

Learn how the flexible features provided by NetSuite can more than accommodate your cloud business system expectations by speaking with a NetSuite consultant today.

NetSuite Vs Quickbook features

Annexa is a leading NetSuite partner with extensive experience designing and implementing comprehensive and customised business systems, including payroll solutions, financial management, warehouse management and ecommerce solutions.