3 Signs You've Outgrown Your Accounting Software Outgrowing your accounting software? You're not alone! Here's what's next for your business.

In the early days of a business, taking a quick and seemingly easy approach to accounting may have made sense. But as a business grows, those same systems will end up costing far too much money and staff time—and keep accountants in the dark about opportunities to run more efficiently or grow the company.

How do you know it's time to move to a more comprehensive financial system? Whether you lead a growing business or provide accounting services to a range of small businesses, here are three signs it's time to up your accounting game:

1. Operating on a cash basis no longer make sense.

If a small business runs on a cash basis, its leaders won't have a clear picture of the company's finances, including profits and what areas are most profitable, where expenses are going, and how revenue matches up with expenses.

With basic accounting software like QuickBooks®, small businesses and the accountants who serve them will need additional software to assess fixed assets, calculate multi-company and consolidation, offer subscription billing, do forecasting, perform financial planning, and many other critical activities.

They'll also find that revenue recognition is challenging, with lots of workarounds, manual journal entries, and complex spreadsheets required. A more comprehensive financial system can schedule revenue recognition automatically and help ensure compliance with national and international requirements.

2. You don't have the insight you need—or data you can trust.

Too often, department heads in small businesses spend time debating whose data is more accurate—and the accounting department spends time reconciling all of that data manually.

Not only is that unproductive, it focuses the accountant's time on producing an out-of-date snapshot of the company's position rather than conducting real-time analysis to identify issues and opportunities early.

Without consistent, accurate data across the business, companies and their accountants can find themselves in Excel hell, verifying and consolidating data from various departmental systems and then moving it all into QuickBooks.

3. A growing hairball of business applications is taking lots of time, resources, and money.

As a business grows, it will often add a range of applications to handle different functions—for payroll, customer relationship management, order management, billing, inventory management, manufacturing, and more.

Too often, businesses only use a fraction of the functionality that an application offers, essentially paying a big price for minimal benefit. And each of these point solutions needs to be integrated and requires maintenance and updating—even if all of the solutions are cloud-based.

While each of those applications may meet the needs of the individual departments, it's a challenge to connect the dots across the company. For example, manufacturing might set a goal in its materials resource planning system to produce product at the lowest possible cost per unit—so they're incentivized to produce more to bring the cost per unit down. Meanwhile, sales may have adjusted its forecast downward—and so the company gets stuck with excess inventory.

Accountants working with companies that have disjointed systems won't be able to catch these kinds of issues until it's too late.

To help address these issues and provide a higher level of service to growing businesses, many accountants who serve small businesses are joining the NetSuite® Accountant Program, which provides training and tools, collaboration opportunities, and the ability to securely provide a range of services remotely. NetSuite offers accountants capabilities that can help increase their strategic role and expand their potential client base.

Interested in making the switch to NetSuite? Schedule your free product tour today.