The Joy in Switching from Quickbooks to NetSuite

Client Quickbooks Situation

We recently assisted a client to get off Quickbooks and on to NetSuite. The project was on-time and on budget despite the risks involved in constituting a new product master containing a half million records and integration to a third party eCommerce system. Much of the success had to do with our client’s commitment to get off Quickbooks and their confidence under our leadership.

Typical Quickbooks Issues in Fast Growing Companies

The client is like so many I encounter who have successfully grown their business to the point that Quickbooks is now choking their growth. See my article here about the common pattern. The general complaints fall into these categories:

1. Quickbooks takes too long to load and is hard to backup
2. Quickbooks runs poorly when you have many users trying to use it at same time
3. Quickbooks may be get corrupted forcing you to execute long-running file-fix programs while no one can assess the system
4. Quickbooks is difficult to run when you are not in your office
5. Quickbooks data isn’t exposed to the web
6. Quickbooks information is difficult to secure and lacks quality audit trail

Prior to going live on NetSuite, our client spent a great deal of their time focusing on these concerns. Everyday, staff productivity was lost. Even though Quickbooks could be considered a small IT footprint, it’s reasonable to assess that these problems are IT related. Yet, the “throw more hardware at it” approach to solve the problem will yield little return due to Quickbooks software architecture. Hence, you are effectively forced to switch systems.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Quickbooks — especially if you are a startup, have few employees, and you are trying to stabilize your product and service offerings. Quickbooks is a great product that is simple to use and very low cost. However, once your business moves into Advanced Growth, Quickbooks’s strengths become weaknesses as it gets in the way of achieving relatively low cost growth.

How NetSuite Solved Quickbooks Scaling Problems

Now that our client is live on NetSuite, company moral has improved. The business is spending more time focusing on increased revenue and lower delivery costs. More time is spent interpreting business information verus nuts-and-bolts IT issues. For each category above, here is life with NetSuite:

1. Loading and Backup: from a logon, NetSuite loads in about 10 seconds. Backup happens behind the scenes without any downtime or need to get off the system.
2. Multiple User Performance: The client has their entire company simultaneously in the system yet they don’t notice any performance issues.
3. Corruption: An Oracle database backs the NetSuite application and excels at enforcing data integrity.
4. Application Access: NetSuite loads in any modern browser from any location. The client is free to be mobile.
5. Web: by design, NetSuite information is web driven. Exposing selected information to third parties (vendors, partner, etc), is by design and straight forward.
6. Security and Audit: NetSuite’s role based permission can be very granular and includes audit trails illustrating who made field level changes including before and after data element changes.

The client is so very overjoyed that they are enthusiastically promoting how much better their situation is to their suppliers who too are suffering from Quickbooks growth pain. I too am pleased as a happy client becomes our best referral source for our NetSuite Systems Integration practice.

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Marty Zigman

Holding all three official certifications, Marty is regarded as the top NetSuite expert and leads a team of senior professionals at Prolecto Resources, Inc. He is a former Deloitte & Touche CPA and has held CTO roles. For over 30 years, Marty has produced leadership in ERP, CRM and eCommerce business systems. Contact Marty to set up a conversation.

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