In the first blog from this series, we talked about five clear signs your business is ready to graduate from QuickBooks to a new business system. These signs centered on business growth and the need for comprehensive, leading-edge technology to manage the complexities and challenges that growth brings.

Everyone grows. But no one keeps wearing the same clothes and shoes that no longer fit their daily activities.

It’s the same with your growing business.

Those canvas sneakers were fine for everyday use, but now you need higher-performance shoes for running, training, hiking, and more. Similarly, QuickBooks worked for your business until you needed more than just accounting.

As you graduate from QuickBooks, how do you know when you’ve found the right fit? What features should you be looking for in a new system that will take your business to the next level?

Acumatica specializes in helping small businesses expand, scale, and achieve their growth ambitions and is the best solution for businesses looking to move beyond QuickBooks. Need more information? Here are five of the top reasons why Acumatica is the best fit for QuickBooks Graduates.

1. Delivering More Robust Accounting Features

QuickBooks fulfills the basic accounting needs of fledgling businesses, but, as your company grows, your financial requirements become more complex. Of course, Acumatica specializes in and delivers the core accounting features that you need to run your business, like general ledger, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and bank feeds. But Acumatica’s comprehensive solution also provides advanced functionalities specifically designed to grow with your business, like:

• Tax Management with flexible tax reporting, the ability to handle sales tax exemption certificates, streamlined tax zone reporting, and a complete audit trail.
• Payroll Management, through which you can easily set overtime rules, manage deductions and benefits, set up pay groups and employee classes, and define earning type codes.
• Multi-Entity and Intercompany Accounting, which allows you to centralize purchasing and invoicing for multiple businesses and teams, automatically allocate accounting transactions among companies, and link bank accounts to specific companies for their exclusive use.
• Global Accounting, which allows for multiple base currencies and multicurrency pricing and supports automated buy/sell relationships between entities across borders.

Acumatica provides all this plus Deferred Revenue Accounting, Fixed Assets Management, Recurring Revenue Management, and so much more.

2. Integrating the Best Applications

In addition to Acumatica’s built-in advanced accounting, CRM, inventory management, warehouse management, and billing solutions that unify your financial and operational processes on a single platform, Acumatica offers a powerful and open cloud platform. This allows for seamless integration with hundreds of third-party applications, enabling you to personalize the system and stay flexible to meet your business needs.

For example, Acumatica’s native integration with the Amazon marketplace retrieves information about Amazon fees, delivers reports that show which products are helping your business grow, encrypts customer information, and supports fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) and fulfilled by merchant (FBM) sales.

DataSelf Analytics combines BI-based reporting and data warehousing to augment Acumatica’s built-in reporting system, giving users deeper insight into business metrics, trends, and forecasting.

3G Pacejet Shipping helps users maintain retail regulatory compliance, capture shipment data, shop for the best shipment rates, automatically create shipping paperwork and compliant labels, and, in general, optimize all over-the-road modes of transportation.

The eWorkplace Apps Quality Management Suite helps companies ensure product quality, meet customer requirements, complete product tests, initiate recalls, manage inspections, and more.

But these are just a few examples of the 131 (and counting) connected applications available through the Acumatica Marketplace.

3. Providing Superior Usability

The words of real-life users—the people who work with the software every day to move their businesses forward—are the true indicators of how usable an ERP system actually is. G2, a leading tech industry surveyor that collects these real-user reviews, recently released its 2024 Spring Reports, which showcased just how much enthusiasm people have for Acumatica. Acumatica received the No. 1 spot across 22 reports and earned 76 badges overall—including the following:

Sharing her thoughts on Acumatica’s high-rated usability, Jennifer Alden, Chief Financial Officer of the Tulsa Performing Arts Center, put it this way: “Our clerk had no previous accounting experience, and now she’s doing all the AP work. I just hired an accountant, and I didn’t have to teach her at all; she just got on the system and easily uses it.”

4. Driving Scalability and Growth

As your business grows and expands locally and globally, you will need to manage multiple entities, currencies, and localizations simultaneously. To achieve this, you want a centralized system that goes beyond just accounting to integrate all your business operations. This ensures that all your teams are connected to the same set of real-time financial and operational data, fostering collaboration and informed decision-making across the organization.

Acumatica provides visibility into all aspects of your company, from revenue and profit margins to product quality and customer satisfaction, so you can make better decisions faster, from any location.

A growing business also needs more hands on deck. While QuickBooks limits you by the number of users, Acumatica scales with you, offering consumption-based licensing without per-user charges. This means everyone, including employees, partners, contractors, and auditors, can access the system without additional costs. With Acumatica, you can provide instant access to necessary information for all users while maintaining control over what each user can see with advanced security measures.

5. Offering Industry-Specific Capabilities

While QuickBooks is a basic accounting solution, providing the same features across the board, Acumatica offers industry-specific software editions that are engineered to address the needs of the Manufacturing, Retail, Construction, and Distribution industries.

So, manufacturers, like QuickBooks Graduate DiamondBack Truck Covers, reduce the time it takes to gather data by 90%, eliminate manual data transfer, get orders to the manufacturing floor in minutes, and significantly improve inventory management, reduce carrying costs, and free cash.

Retailers, like QuickBooks Graduate Killer Merch and Jeffree Star Cosmetics, manage hundreds of thousands of orders per week, cut shipping time by 80-90%, achieve data transparency for the entire supply and order fulfillment chain, gain real-time inventory visibility, and automate SKU generation.

Contractors, like QuickBooks Graduate Phoenix Renovation and Restoration, use Acumatica to manage hundreds of open and active projects simultaneously, save money and time by reducing paper-based processes and associated risks, and become (and stay) cash flow positive.

And distributors, like QuickBooks Graduate ToughBuilt, save hours of data entry time, use custom dashboards to gain instant reports and data access, automatically process orders, save money, and boost sales by investing in research and development employees.

Graduating to Acumatica

If you’re experiencing the business-hindering constraints of QuickBooks, it’s time to graduate to a comprehensive ERP solution that is the best fit to help you grow and scale your operations. And Acumatica’s accounting features, application integrations, usable interface, scalable platform, and industry-specific functionalities are built to grow right along with you.

Still wondering how to recognize other limitations of QuickBooks that may make your business stumble? Want to hear more from the real-life experiences of QuickBooks Graduates? Stay tuned for our next posts in this series!