For many businesses, there comes a time when your existing technology simply isn’t enough. What worked well in the beginning might not last you to the next stage of your business journey.
It starts with small gaps, team members creating workarounds and haphazardly meshing spreadsheets with email systems to plug what they can. But eventually, this doesn’t cut it – and isn’t best practice.
Imagine you start your own cafe, a beautiful sunny space that locals quickly come to love for a morning coffee, takeaway croissant or leisurely weekend lunch. Over time, this success translates into growth; you open two, then three, then suddenly you have five outposts across the city.
Customers start asking if they can buy your in-house roasted coffee beans to make their own coffee at home. As this part of the business expands, you’re dealing with more complex manufacturing and retail processes across a number of entities.
Somewhere along all of this, you realise that your existing cloud-accounting tool, Xero, can’t keep up. It still has the powerful accounting capabilities you need and an easy-to-use interface, but struggles with the rest of what you need.
Suddenly, cracks are appearing:
- You're asked about cash flow across all locations in a meeting and realise you don't have a clear answer.
- Your finance manager doesn't have time to analyse the financial performance of the group, as they are consumed by the manual process of consolidating and reconciling five separate Xero or QuickBooks Online files each month.
- A key supplier threatens to put you on credit hold because their invoice has been sitting in someone's email for three weeks, lost in an informal approval chain.
- You're making expansion decisions based on gut feeling rather than real-time profitability data because getting accurate numbers takes too long.
Ideally, you’d have full visibility across entities and their financial operations, including everything from cash flow to spend tracking and approvals, all in real-time. This would give you the right intel to manage the business day-to-day and plan for future growth.
You’ve thought about NetSuite, but there are a few things holding you back. The cost and time involved, but mostly that it feels like a huge leap.
It seems as though there are two options:
- Stay with Xero or QuickBooks Online
While the team would enjoy the same functionality they’re used to, you’d increasingly need to find workarounds for capabilities not found in the platform – like scheduling, multi-entity reporting and workflows. Over time, errors would happen more often, like duplicate payments, missed approvals and inconsistent coding across entities, impacting cash flow, visibility and wasting huge amounts of time. Your team would spend more time working outside of the system in ad-hoc workflows, like complex spreadsheets, or using other technology tools to carry the load.
- Move to NetSuite
This would bring the extra functionality a business needs, but it might take a big outlay of cash (both for software licensing and implementation) and many months to get up and running. Once live, the team would need training to get up to speed and comfortable using the new tool. You might not have the time or resources free to dedicate to getting this right. Even if you did switch, you’d still have to continue using your existing system while going through the implementation.
