The following post was written by Valerie Silvani, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Gravity Software. Valerie was kind enough to allow us to share it with our readers.
In the past, companies would keep their accounting system for about seven years. However, as these businesses began to grow, gaps would emerge, causing more and more manual work by employees. What was once a great accounting solution is now patched up with additional applications, many that don’t even speak to each other. Think of all those databases that you must manage and additional people to hire! There’s no resemblance of real-time insights on the horizon. Not sure if you saw the movie Bird Box with Sandra Bullock, but if you did, you can relate. If you’re on QuickBooks™, I know you feel the pain.
I’ve been in the accounting software business for about 18 years now, and technology has changed tremendously. I’m connected in so many ways; I have my iPhone that can pretty much do anything but dance. It gives me alerts for my activities throughout the day and when cooking a steak, it tells me when it’s medium rare. It alerts me when someone follows me on Twitter, who wants to connect on LinkedIn, and more.
Avoid These Seven Mistakes
Your accounting system should have similar intelligence to do the same thing for your business. Your employees should be able to collaborate from anywhere, at anytime in a secure hosted environment. If you’re looking to upgrade, here are seven mistakes to avoid when purchasing accounting software.
1. It Has Beautiful Screens
It’s easy to make accounting software look beautiful, but does that cute baby blue interface really work in the real world? A screen that has a picture of how your check will look like when printed may impress you, but try cutting 25+ checks one at a time in that interface. Not so beautiful anymore!
2. It Has built-in dashboards
Almost every product today has dashboards. They call it business intelligence, but how intelligent is a dashboard that’s not customizable to what is important to you? What about canned templates that mean nothing to you and you can’t change them? You need feature-rich tools that let you configure your own dashboards with real-time data, and that you can slice and dice the way you want.
3. It Has great security
Most business applications today have multiple levels of security, but what about a desktop application? We are in the era of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) world. We all want to use Excel and report writers to get at the data and how we want to see it. Most of these tools will bypass the application’s security leaving your company exposed. Security needs to be bound to the data, not the application!
4. It does everything
It is easy to demo software to make it look like it can do almost anything. Do your due diligence and document your company’s must-have requirements. During your demo, make sure to see that all those requirements have been met!
5. It is too expensive
It is always easy to first evaluate what something costs before evaluating its value. Business tools should always be evaluated on the impact they make to the company. What is the ROI? How will this solution leverage my company’s growth? Would you spend $10,000 to save $500,000?
6. data conversion is a breeze
Really? Anybody that says data conversion is a breeze is simply living in another world. One of the most important factors in implementing a new system is to take advantage of its capabilities, but using old data structures can be limiting. For example, if the old system is limited to a simple chart of accounts structure, then converting it as is can limit the new system. Instead of converting, you should be re-aligning your old data along the structures of the new system’s capabilities. Take advantage of your new efficiencies to grow your business faster!
7. I love my servers
Who really wants to maintain servers? Cloud technology is the way to go! It should be agile and run in a browser interface. You don’t make money managing hardware, infrastructure, or software. Why not access your information at any time, anywhere and on any device?
Today, with a little effort, it is easy to get great accounting software. Expand your options and look beyond your comfort zone. It’s a brave new world in software!
Do Your Due Diligence
Can you answer the question “How well is your accounting software performing?” Is it keeping up with your workload and business growth? Are your employees able to collaborate in a secure cloud-based environment? If not, take a look at Gravity Software™ (Gravity). Gravity hit the mid-market in cloud accounting and is built on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 (aka Microsoft CRM) platform. Why is this important to you? By utilizing the Dynamics 365 platform, Gravity brings the applications that run your accounting and operations together with the office apps you already use and know.
When your business financials are fully integrated with all your applications in just one database, you can easily consolidate data instead of trying to maintain separate database. By adopting a cloud accounting solution with an integrated platform like Gravity, you get real-time insights so you can make better informed decisions on your business.
Get your business connected and schedule an online demo of Gravity today! My business is connected. Is yours?
Are you interested in learning more about accounting software selection processes? Join the K2 Enterprises team at one of our technology conferences to get the information you need to help make the right decision. For more details, just click the button below.
