🛠️ Tools | Moving Past the Paper Napkin #03

Advanced tools to move past Quickbooks Online as a later-stage company

Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

Last week, I wrote about the tools you’ll need if you’ve been in business past the entry level and your transaction level has increased. This is the last post for this series!

Your company is in its later stage and ready to move past Quickbooks Online and implement advanced tools. You’re expanding internationally, creating subsidiaries, and inventory management has become unwieldy; what tools will help you keep track of your finances and accounting?

1. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems

2. Data, Planning, & Business Intelligence Tools

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems

Moving past Quickbooks Online’s accounting system means spending up to five or six figures on implementing an ERP system. So, you need to determine whether there’s a need for it as a business. Does it make sense? Would it help consolidate even more disparate processes and help centralize your finance/accounting/operations data? Quickbooks Online is not good at handling a heavy inventory-based business or multiple subsidiaries under a holding company or a nonprofit that has multiple government grants and complicated grant tracking requirements. In this case, I would say it’s worth considering an ERP system.

Popular examples of ERP systems are Netsuite, Sage Intacct, and Microsoft Dynamics 365. If you’re a nonprofit, I know that Netsuite has a social impact program to help you get the basic Netsuite package at a minimum cost. But, if you decide to get these ERPs via a reseller or a firm, expect to pay the full price. Once it’s been decided that an ERP system is needed, plan for implementation to take at least a year and have ample resources for staff training. Think about how the rollout process will be explained to each department and how you’ll want each department to interact with the ERP. Habits are hard to change, so expect resistance from your team, but as long you can explain the end goal of data centralization and have everyone’s eyes on the North Star goal, this should help ease the pain of implementation.

Data, Planning, & Business Intelligence Tools

As a company, you’re now generating tons of data from customers and vendors. How can you analyze the data in a way that’s useful to business operations? How can you make sure you’re purchasing the right things and pricing your products correctly? As it’s the running theme of this post, these tools will cost money but will help to further simplify processes and produce even better business reports. Examples of tools you can implement include Sudozi, Cube, Mosaic, and Anaplan. For business intelligence dashboards, you can use Tableau, Power BI, and Looker. Every year, new tools in this category are being created so you might have to shop around for the best tools for your business situation. There’s no one-size-fits-all type tool out there, and customizations will be needed.

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With all tools you choose to implement, always think about how that tool integrates into your current or new tech stack in your business. You don’t want to implement a stand-alone tool that doesn’t connect to one central business system. You’ll just create more spreadsheets and data wrangling. You don’t have to go with the tools I’ve talked about so far because there are many industry-specific tools for nonprofits, restaurants, schools, retail, etc that are built with the key metrics most commonly tracked in mind. At the end of the day, it’s your business; build your operations to work for you and your team.

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🔜 In the next series, we’ll be exploring financial statements! The next post will be looking at the Income Statement. What is it? How do you read it? What does it tell you about your business? What expenses should you keep an eye on?

📥 Office Hours is on! Use this anonymous form to send in any finance and accounting business questions you may have.

😁 Disclaimer: I'm not your employee or finance consultant, so all business decisions are yours to make.

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Woolichooks provides finance digital transformation services, which include setting up finance software systems and processes to enable companies to scale for growth.