Today, there’s a point – say a $5m company, where QuickBooks becomes extremely cumbersome – lack of inventory, project based features, retail and ecommerce, the list goes on – sure – there’s lots of add ons and 3^rd Party products – but features in these follow on products are limited because no one is going to pay $10k to add onto a $300 program – so you can only develop and deliver so much on limited budgets. Yet companies go forward, developing workarounds and it’s not uncommon to see $50m and $60m companies running on good ol’ QB.

Risk is an issue. Later versions of QuickBooks have added things like keystroke logs and segregation of duties protocols – but these are seldom set up early in the company, when a single user is making all the entries, why would you need a record of who did what? You know.

Today’s episode is an interview with Mark Lee, CPA and Principle behind Maui Tax. Mr. Lee started his CPA career with Deloitte and worked with or ran major CPA consulting operations based in Texas, New York City, London and even an exotic posting in Dubai for a few years.  Throughout, he encountered companies large and small running QuickBooks and his primary advise revolved around the ‘false sense of security’ that developed. Companies believed they were running a professional accounting package when the initial impetus for QuickBooks’ creation was ‘bookkeeping software for people who don’t understand accounting.’

Topics covered in today’s podcast include:

• Risk – with QuickBooks at the center of dozens of forensic accounting cases involving embezzlement due to lack of adequate controls in place

• Waste – Labor associated with excessive manual data entry and moreso on the dozens and more spreadsheets needed to attempt adequate reporting

• Functionality – limited reporting prevents full visibility of basic business operations with many add on modules not covered in reporting at all – not to mention the lack of operational digitalization

The conclusion is, that for most companies above $5m in annual revenue, hidden costs outstrip the cost of completely replacing QuickBooks with ERP – however – most emerging companies lack the on-staff business analysts to reach this conclusion. ProfitFromERP provides fractional CIO services, including advisory discussions at the highest level, through thorough analysis of front-line operations, business workflow and redesign – leading to the development of Cost/Revenue Modeling to create and deliver justification for moving up to ERP as well as defining the company goals and targets to make the new ERP system pay for itself within a short window – thus the development of the new tagline, ProfitFromERP, our clients make ERP PAY!