5 Signs That Your Business Needs a Software Upgrade to NetSuite.
With growth comes evolving needs. And with that, the inability of businesses to settle for the basic functionality that is offered by entry-level accounting software.
Sooner or later, most business leaders realize that an accounting upgrade lurks just around the corner. Entry-level accounting tools might seem workable and reasonable at first, given their low price point and low IT overhead. But soon, their clunky functioning and limited features get in the way of growth. As everyday operations become more complex, inefficient, and time-consuming, strategic initiatives are forced to take a back seat. Furthermore, businesses have to make do with stale financial and business data that defeats the purpose entirely.
Simply put, poor management of key business processes and stale reporting prevent businesses from reaching their full potential. This makes accounting software upgrades an obvious inevitability. But is NetSuite the answer to your growth pains? And if so, when is the right time to make the switch? Can switching at the right time make any difference to your overall NetSuite experience?
In this blog, we explore the answers to these questions and more. We rely on our experience of working closely with various clients in making the NetSuite experience a great one for them. Let’s begin!
Your business is probably experiencing growth pains.
But, is NetSuite the answer to that?
Your current software may be working out just fine for your accounting team, but is it benefiting your entire business as well as it should? If not, your business is probably experiencing what is known as growth pains. In other words, the growth of your business has surpassed your accounting software’s ability to support that growth. In effect, it is hindering your accounting team from focusing on what really counts–i.e. optimizing cash flow and business receivables.
For businesses experiencing such a situation, NetSuite is often the answer.
NetSuite by Oracle is a complete, self-service suite of cloud-based business applications that are seamlessly integrated. It is a full-fledged ERP tool that goes beyond accounting capabilities like invoicing, bill payment, and bank reconciliation. It helps you to manage production, inventory, order cycle, recurring billing, automatic revenue recognition, customer relationships, fixed assets, cash flow, and much more. Say goodbye to making manual journal entries, managing recognition schedules manually across multiple spreadsheets, and daily struggles to pull together data on various cyclical operations like quote-to-order, order-to-cash, bank reconciliation, and the overall cash flow landscape of the business. With NetSuite, all these will be a thing of the past. You will have live business data and insights at your fingertips at all times.
Of course, NetSuite is not the only software that can do this. But, it is definitely one of the leading software that expertly handles financial requirements, managerial requirements, reporting needs, and decision-making needs of most businesses.
Many small and medium businesses have to enter data at multiple places since no one software can do this job for them. To solve this problem, NetSuite is power-packed with a number of pre-built integrations across a wide range of external applications. If you need custom integrations over and above the pre-built ones, you can also achieve the same using NetSuite’s APIs. Thus, if your current data needs or future scalability is at stake, NetSuite is usually the way forward for you (barring a few exceptions, which we will touch upon towards the end of this article).
Now that we’ve established what NetSuite can do for your business, let’s understand when you should make the switch.
When is the right time to switch to NetSuite?
5 unmissable signs that help you decide when to take the leap.
#1 Do you have enough forward visibility in your business?
In other words, can you answer mission-critical questions about your business at all times?
Forward visibility into the key processes of your business helps you to understand which areas are running smoothly and which areas need your attention. However, when individuals and groups have no way of sharing information on situations and events as they occur, your business data becomes siloed. Data silos prevent your team members from collaborating on important matters.
A simple example of this is customer data. Various fragments of your customer data lie around in different, disintegrated systems like your accounting system, CRM system, inventory management system, and purchase order (PO) system. Data needs to be entered into each of these systems separately and are rarely synced together. Hence, multiple departments and teams execute tasks with regard to the same entity (i.e. customer) but rely on a different version of the customer data.
Interestingly, none of these siloed systems is connected to the rest of your business. For an integrated view of customers, you will have to extract reports from these multiple, disparate systems and reconcile them in Excel. But even then, the reconciled customer information will become stale quickly and there is no way for your entire team to access it and use it to their advantage at all times.
If this sounds familiar, then it’s time to move to NetSuite. With NetSuite, everyone in your company can finally access and make the most of the same set of information. This will lead to quicker and more data-driven decisions that align with each other as well as with your business overall. NetSuite integrates all areas of your business and gives back the control of data and decision-making to where it belongs–i.e., you.
#2 Do you have access to business data in real time?
When you drive a car, your eyes are on the road. Sure, you may look in the rear-view mirror every once in a while, but largely, your attention is on what lies ahead. Using entry-level accounting software is a lot like driving a car by looking only at the rear-view mirror, i.e. old data.
Typically, along with entry-level accounting software, one needs to use several additional tools to perform day-to-day operations. The data in these tools are rarely updated or synced in real time. Lack of real-time reporting leads to the absence of timely information, which in turn forces business leaders to make decisions based on gut feeling instead of relying on insights derived from accurate and fresh data.
Since there is no single source of truth for key entities like customers, inventory, orders, cash flow, etc. each and every isolated database needs to be synced simultaneously to gain an understanding of each key business metric. Not only do businesses often fail to do this due to a lack of time and resources, but the problem also gets further compounded due to data redundancy, sync errors, duplicate entries, a high error rate in entering the data manually, and so on.
Falling behind on reporting is one key issue that is resolved by NetSuite. Real-time and seamless syncing happens across numerous internal and external applications, third-party integrations, users, departments, and entities. This means that your business is connected to updated AND accurate data at all times instead of having to run processes and decisions with backward-looking financials.
#3 Is financial consolidation becoming a headache for you?
Did you know? Global expansion has often turned out to be a driving factor for businesses to move on from an entry-level accounting system to NetSuite.
Multiple subsidiaries, multiple currencies, diverse accounting regulations, and handling tax burdens across geographical borders are often unmanageable with entry-level accounting software. An accounting system that cannot scale across geographies and entities or consolidate multiple revenue streams at the transactional level can become a major impediment to your growth.
NetSuite is legendary when it comes to tackling financials across multiple entities, currencies, and environments. It helps you to retain focus on high-value decisions while doing the dirty work for you and your team. If you foresee your business flexing its muscles across borders in the near future, consider moving to NetSuite right away.
#4 Are you experiencing IT productivity bottlenecks?
A tiresome byproduct of using entry-level accounting software is to rely heavily on the IT team to provide other team members with data and insights.
For example, if your sales team wants to get the latest data on prospects and insights on how to close deals faster, it will have to request your IT team to furnish the necessary details. If your purchase manager wants to know how order cycles can be improved or how the inventory can be managed better, it will have to go through the IT team to gain a data-driven perspective into the same. If you want to know how well your fixed assets are generating returns, you will have to wait for your IT team to crunch the data and provide you with the relevant numbers that tell the story.
Self-service tools like NetSuite eliminate the problem of heavy reliance on IT teams.
NetSuite is an interactive tool that can answer questions about customers, orders, inventory, fixed assets, or any other business entity–all at the same time. Role-based dashboards provide pre-configured reporting that makes life easier for your team through dramatically streamlined workflows. It enables and empowers team members to detect and predict trends on the fly and respond to them proactively.
This way, your in-house IT resources, if any, can be reserved for fire-fighting more critical issues and streamlining the overall business productivity. They don’t need to concern themselves with mundane issues like managing on-premise servers or answering routine questions of other team members. In fact, many businesses using NetSuite don’t even have an in-house IT team!
#5 Is your industry ripe for NetSuite?
Some industries are naturally a better fit for NetSuite than others. If your business is inventory-heavy, for example, you are likely to gain a lot from switching to NetSuite.
Businesses from established industries whose processes and workflows are standardized usually benefit more from NetSuite as compared to businesses whose industries are still nascent and yet to mature.
Similarly, businesses grappling with omnichannel e-commerce solutions, omnichannel sales, and complex operations spread across entities, geographies, languages, and currencies are great candidates for NetSuite. Industries, where opportunities for cross-selling and upselling need to be carefully assessed and grabbed, are also likely to be good for NetSuite.
If most of your competitors are already using NetSuite, then your industry is probably ripe for the software.
As a general rule, mid-market businesses and large enterprises benefit significantly more from NetSuite than small and micro businesses, but there are no hard and fast rules. The earlier you adopt NetSuite, the sooner you get to see positive ROI from the implementation, and the more prepared you are for boundless growth in the near future.
We at BA Software assess your needs in depth to help you determine if NetSuite is the right fit for you. We are also fairly straightforward about any possible misalignment between your business and NetSuite. On the whole, making a clear, objective decision about switching to NetSuite and timing it right can go a long way in making the NetSuite experience a successful one for you.
Want to switch to NetSuite? We are a phone call away.
Thank you for reading this article. If you have a question to ask or a comment to share or wish to know more about how we can help you in your NetSuite journey, please get in touch with us.
A customer relationship management (CRM) system helps you collect, organize and analyze client information. This process allows you to build and maintain relationships with your existing customers and find potential new customers. Many businesses rely on cloud-based platforms, such as Salesforce and Hubspot, to manage their client relations as their businesses grow.