Your Guide to Comparing QuickBooks Enterprise vs. Acumatica ERP
Not Sure Whether to Choose Acumatica ERP or QuickBooks Enterprise? This Clear Comparison Will Help.
If you’ve been running a business for years, there’s a high likelihood you’ve been running QuickBooks for years. After all, it’s a great accounting tool for small companies and it grows with you as you increase your customers and sales.
Well… it grows with you up to a point.
Eventually, organizations like yours that are using QuickBooks must make a decision about whether or not it’s time to move to an ERP – and that decision is a big one because it will determine the course of your future business growth and expansion.
Considering the stakes involved, you don’t want to make the wrong decision. You also don’t want to get caught in analysis paralysis because in today’s agile business landscape, one slow decision could leave you forever lagging behind your competitors.
Now is the time to decide – but you need facts, so you can make the best choice. If you’re currently trying to choose between a large accounting solution like QuickBooks Enterprise or a true ERP like Acumatica Cloud ERP, this comparison guide will help.
The Most Important Difference Between QuickBooks Enterprise and Acumatica ERP
Before we dive in to the subtle shadings of difference between QuickBooks and Acumatica, let’s briefly discuss the elephant in the room: QuickBooks Enterprise is not an ERP solution, it’s an accounting solution.
Accounting systems like QuickBooks are designed to handle your books, whereas enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) like Acumatica are designed to handle every aspect of your complex business.
Since you’ve been running QuickBooks for all this time, you may think that using disparate systems to run your business is “just the way things are done.” However, we assure you, running multiple siloed systems is not an effective solution for today’s most productive, efficient, fast-growing businesses.
To be clear: Large, successful businesses do not spend hours re-keying data into multiple systems, and they do not deal with frequent crashes or slowdowns resulting from massive records.
If your business is currently suffering from those specific accounting system woes, we highly recommend that you consider an ERP solution instead of an upgrade to your QuickBooks accounting tool. It’s time. Contact the ERP transition experts at SWK Technologies for help solving these issues quickly.
If you are not yet experiencing the above symptoms, read on.
3 Ways to Compare QuickBooks Enterprise and Acumatica Cloud ERP
The best ways to compare these two very different systems is to frame each solution in terms of your business’s needs. By carefully considering each solution’s effect on your industry, your customization preferences, and your plans for future growth, you should be able to gain an accurate assessment of which solution would work best for your organization.
- Industry-Specific Tools
QuickBooks Enterprise now offers basic industry-vertical tools, such as inventory valuation through average costing and FIFO; as well as warehouse tracking by bin location, serial number, or lot number. However, QuickBooks’ enterprise accounting solution does not offer much functionality beyond the basics and customization can be costly.
Alternately, ERP solutions like Acumatica are built to handle specific vertical requirements with ease. Acumatica is flexible enough to handle standard cost, FIFO, moving average, and item-specific valuation methods; provides comprehensive warehouse tracking seamlessly integrated with barcode scanners; and even offers inventory replenishment recommendations, as well work-in-process (WIP) tracking and real-time tracking across the production floor.
- QuickBooks Enterprise leaves companies managing multiple external spreadsheets if they have complex manufacturing processes or handle expiration-sensitive items. Hierarchical BOMs or food & beverage compliance don’t make for a good fit with QuickBooks.
- Acumatica Cloud ERP fully adapts to your exact needs, offering a range of standard functions for specific verticals like:
– Wholesale Distributors
– Ecommerce Companies
– Subscription-Based Businesses
– Discrete Manufacturers
– Plus more
Acumatica offers fully dynamic BOMs and expiration date tracking with automatic removal of expired items from inventory – and even provides intelligent tools to help you keep your inventory lean and cost-effective.
“QuickBooks wasn’t giving us the visibility we needed across the business, especially regarding production and inventory. …It became clear that basic financial software was not sufficient anymore.” (Derek Szabo, Devil’s Peak Brewing Company)
“[QuickBooks:] It’s not applicable to a sophisticated business like ours.” (Ronald Krieger, Consolidated West Distributing)
- Customization Flexibility
QuickBooks delivers a solid, one-size-fits-all solution that helps set up standardized processes and workflows for SMBs but, in our experience, complex businesses are never “one-size-fits-all” like QuickBooks wants them to be.
Consider: Your company is known for your unique quality and service and your products or services are unique as well. You have individualistic employees who each like to do things “their way” – and if you sell to big-box stores, you know all too well that the large retailers have very precise requirements that you must follow as a supplier.
Applying small tweaks and workarounds to each of your processes isn’t hard when your business is small and you only have a handful of employees and a few hundred products, but when you have 20 individual employees handling tens of thousands of products that must meet the needs of multiple large retailers… well, that’s when things get tricky. And that’s also when things start to fall through the cracks.
- QuickBooks Enterprise offers configuration tools and connected apps, but runs on proprietary code, which means it can get costly to add a significant amount of custom capability to the system.
Unfortunately, closed systems like this prohibit innovation, which might explain why QuickBooks’ annual updates tend to provide underwhelming features like new on-screen buttons and multi-monitor support.
- Acumatica ERP provides extensive marketplace apps, as well as comprehensive customization and configuration tools written in the easy-to-modify, industry-standard .NET framework that most developers are extremely familiar with. Even better? Acumatica is built on the highly flexible Acumatica Cloud xRP platform. Many enterprise users choose Acumatica over its competition because the Acumatica Cloud xRP platform makes it possible for Acumatica users to limitlessly modify their ERP in virtually any way they can imagine.
Since Acumatica power-users and the Acumatica team are constantly pushing the envelope and discovering new ways to use and modify the platform, all Acumatica users benefit from cutting-edge innovation and the fact that 75% of Acumatica employees work in R&D.
This year thus far, Acumatica has implemented machine learning into ERP search functions, and they continue to integrate external technology into Acumatica, including Microsoft’s HoloLens, Amazon’s Alexa, and camera drones.
“One of the best things about Acumatica is how customizable it is, especially the user interface. I can change screens, processes, and workflows. I can also create custom reports by connecting tables, combining tables, and then generate a single table that has all the information I need.” (Taylan Sevimli, Business Development Manager, Tayse)
“Acumatica comes with a framework, but they let us stretch and change it, so it works for us the way we need it to.” (Sevimli, Tayse)
“We were getting by on QuickBooks, but I knew the advantage that more powerful software could bring to us and our customers.” (Dan Wilkins, Bell and Company)
- Pathway to Growth
In our modern world, consistent corporate growth requires two things: true insight into accurate numbers and the ability to break down silos by connecting all users at all times. Though QuickBooks Enterprise unfortunately falls flat in both these areas, Acumatica delivers the pathway to growth that expanding enterprises need to succeed.
- QuickBooks Enterprise requires a cumbersome amount of re-keying data, which leads to data errors and hard-to-track numbers. When the numbers in your system are constantly shifting around, you won’t have the single-source of data you need to make fast, confident decisions that drive your business forward. Instead, your system will always only have part of the big picture, meaning you’ll have to reference multiple files before coming up with a new strategy. That’s too slow for today’s world.
In addition, QuickBooks also limits your company to no more than 30 users in the system. This prohibits information access and slows down your company’s processes while your staff or customers are forced to wait on answers or updates from the system’s few authorized users.
- Acumatica Cloud ERP provides secure, data access to unlimited users, and its integrated setup reduces or eliminates error-prone duplicate date entry. Unlimited user access is relatively unique in the ERP world, but this surprising feature supports Acumatica’s core philosophy of providing openness across every aspect of the business. (That’s also why Acumatica is so flexible.)
Because Acumatica is a true cloud solution, it’s also available anywhere and anytime, on any device. All you need to access Acumatica is a browser and an internet connection. This means that, with the Cloud ERP, not only can authorized users access relevant data directly from a single source of information without bottlenecks or delays, they can access it wherever they are. This freedom helps your company get paid faster, receive outstanding customer reviews, and pull ahead of the competition.
“When we were using QuickBooks, we had difficulty generating the reports we needed, and Acumatica has given us the flexibility to put together any type of report we want, which gives us the visibility into our most important data.” (Sevimli, Tayse)
“It’s like the numbers kept moving [with QuickBooks]. Now that we’re using Acumatica, they’re limited to what they can do. I don’t have to go back and correct as many things.” (Susan Reese, Finance, Tayse)
Your Journey to Cloud ERP Starts with Choosing the Right QuickBooks to Acumatica Migration Partner
Get true support for your QuickBooks to Acumatica migration from the experts at SWK Technologies. The team at SWK Technologies helped companies across a wide range of industries achieve their technology goals and, recently, they helped Tayse Rugs implement Acumatica.
Tayse Rugs had been using QuickBooks Enterprise to handle operations and financials at their rapidly growing rug and furniture distribution business, but once the company grew from 100 orders a day to 1,000s of orders per day, QuickBooks was no longer able to keep up.
“Processing orders at first was easy. But as we began adding more products and dealing with some of the biggest names in eCommerce, including Amazon and Walmart, the ability to import and export data between systems became time consuming, tedious, and prone to human error.” (Taylan Sevimli, Business Development Manager, Tayse)
Acumatica’s industry-specific tools, customization flexibility, and pathway to growth stood out to Tayse, which is why they chose to hire SWK Technologies to replace their QuickBooks Enterprise system with Acumatica Financial Management and Acumatica Distribution Edition. Because Tayse worked with the QuickBooks migration experts at SWK Technologies, the implementation went smoothly.
“Our partner, Dynamic Tech (now SWK Technologies)… helped us tremendously when we were switching from QuickBooks to Acumatica. The transition in general was pretty straightforward and easy.” (Sevimli, Tayse)
“They really helped us, so it wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be.” (Susan Reese, Finance, Tayse)
You Should Expect Your Business to Mature into an ERP – and You Should Want It To
At this point, you should have a clearer idea of whether you should choose QuickBooks Enterprise or Acumatica Cloud ERP to support your business growth now. However, don’t forget to consider how your company might change and evolve over the next decade.
These days, most organizations are pivoting faster and more often. Think about it: Right now, are you exactly where you expected to be when you were planning five years ago – or has everything changed? If your plans have changed along the way, how have you needed to change your QuickBooks usage to keep up?
For many companies, the choice to use Acumatica isn’t necessarily based on needing industry-specific functionality, unlimited users, improved customization options, or better insight right now – it’s based on the fact that Acumatica offers full flexibility to its users forever.
If you suspect that, down the road, you may want to take advantage of cutting-edge technologies like AI or machine learning, or that you may want the freedom to create your own custom software capabilities using the Acumatica Cloud xRP platform, Acumatica makes that goal a reality. If you want to scale globally or create new business entities with completely different business models, Acumatica will keep up with you at every step. Even if all you want to do is work seamlessly from anywhere in the world (including your own living room), Acumatica frees you to do that too.
“You often hear about the complexity of ERP systems. With Acumatica, I think we got the full capability of an ERP with the simplicity that allows not only me, but our whole sales force to take advantage of the system.” (Wilkins, Bell and Company)
With Acumatica, you can build your business management software into whatever you want it to be, which means you can support your business wherever it takes you.
Where will your business take you?
Still have questions? Then take your time and learn more about cloud ERP, research ERP solutions, or evaluate the ERP systems you’re considering.
Heard enough? Schedule a demo of Acumatica or get a free quote from the experts at SWK Technologies.
