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Discover Why the Sunsetting of QuickBooks Is Moving Businesses to Cloud-Based Services Speed up your bookkeeping practices while reducing errors and manual tasks.

By Entrepreneur Store Edited by Jason Fell

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Every year, Intuit retires a version of QuickBooks Desktop, and at the end of this month on May 31st, QuickBooks Desktop Premier 2018 will fade away with another installment of the annual sunset. For entrepreneurs looking to improve their bookkeeping practices, there's a breadth of research cataloguing how QuickBooks could be holding your business back.

Looking at these limitations, and at more contemporary and comprehensive cloud-based services, this piece will explore how entrepreneurs, executives, and senior management professionals might take this upcoming QuickBooks sunset and use it as an opportunity to take your accounting and resource planning into the future.

Reduce time managing spreadsheets.

Looking at white papers research from Oracle NetSuite, which is the top cloud-based enterprise resource planning software (ERP), you can learn why QuickBooks is an aging business system that leads to fragmented reporting and relentless IT expenses. For anyone who has lost records, had to readjust their entire business because of an Intuit QuickBooks sunset, switching to a more up-to-date, cloud-based solution can make all the difference.

In its white paper research pieces, NetSuite explores how its cloud solution ultimately lowers your costs, streamlines key business processes, and boosts productivity. While QuickBooks mainly offers spreadsheets as a tool for accounting, which become limiting when managing a larger business, NetSuite offers a suite of applications, including HR management software (HRMS), professional services automation, as well as e-commerce features.

Keep data accurate and error-free.

Continuing an existing system on an aging software like QuickBooks, which sunsets versions people use year after year, is not an effective way to streamline business and save money. Not only is it proven that running a comprehensive business with just spreadsheets lead to wasted time and increased complexities, it also can be cause for misreporting of accounting and business data.

According to Oracle NetSuite, 66 percent of surveyed organizations had challenges with an inability to handle complex accounting needs using QuickBooks. Eighty percent of surveyed organizations switched to NetSuite because they needed better reporting and tracking. Ninety-three percent of surveyed organizations increased visibility and control over the business since making the switch to NetSuite from QuickBooks.

Reduce manual processes and other wasteful practices to increase revenue.

In addition to adding unnecessary, costly work hours to a company's payroll — featuring inefficient manual processes, like those that are common with accounting on QuickBooks, hurts profits. Having inaccurate, untimely, or fragmented financial and performance reports hinder an executive's ability to make decisions on a day-to-day basis, and grow their business as steadily as possible.

In Oracle NetSuite's whitepapers, a piece entitled 8 Ways Cloud ERP Helps Organizations Build Resilience and Agility explains how using a cloud ERP like Oracle leads to smoother operating. It then explains how that foundation can help a business build resistance and create momentum, collaborate better remotely, as well as track a team's performance while minimizing operational risk.

Finance executives, IT professionals, senior managers, and bustling entrepreneurs — the QuickBooks annual sunset is a reminder that desktop accounting softwares are aging and outdated. To keep up with the speed and efficiency of competitors, finding an ERP solution like NetSuite that incorporates everything into one suite of business software is essential.

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