Is Your Software Company Outgrowing QuickBooks?

How do you know, definitively, it's time to upgrade your accounting solution? QuickBooks got you by when you were a smaller, order-centric business. But when your business has a variety of billing models or recurring revenue, you’ll start feeling mounting growing pains as invoices and revenue schedules grow in number and complexity. You might be able to limp along with QuickBooks for your SaaS accounting for a little while longer, but you’d be missing out on the benefits that automation could bring, including:

• Speeding quote-to-cash cycles by as much as 30 to 60%
• Freeing thousands to millions in cash for investment
• Shortening your close by as much as 30% to 75%
• Increasing your valuation with more accurate forecasting for making strategic decisions

Most Immediate Challenge: Cash Management

In a recent eBook entitled, “Is Your Software Company Outgrowing QuickBooks? 5 Signs It’s Time to Move,” our SaaS accounting experts detail the most pressing challenges software and subscription companies using QuickBooks are facing right now: Cash management and forecasting.

We’ve been hearing this a lot lately: “We can’t efficiently predict our cash to manage operations and invest in the business.” In addition to the challenge of reporting, when you’re piecing together multiple systems and spreadsheets, you also impact your ability to forecast what’s happening in your business—when will revenue be recognized, what has been billed already, and when will the cash come in? Forecasting happens once a month or once a quarter instead of happening continuously and on demand.

Symptoms You May Recognize

Here are the symptoms to be watching for that signal an increasing urgency that your organization is outgrowing QuickBooks:

• Capital consumption: Not knowing your cash position means that you can easily overspend and over extend.
• Less business agility: Investments get delayed or aren't made at all—decisions to invest more in your product, hire, acquire and more.
• Slower business growth: Delaying investments delays or hinders business growth without the right tools.
• Losing to your competition: Slower decision making decreases your ability to outmaneuver and respond to the competition.

Avoid Negative Impact

Ideally, you want your quote to financial forecast process connected and working from a single source of truth so that forecasts on revenue, cash, and billings can be run with the click of button. No more waiting on the data to make those important decisions that impact cash consumption and growth. Companies that can see several years into the future have an edge over the competition and can be more effective in getting funding or moving to IPO.

But unlike when you bought QuickBooks off the shelf or online and started using it back in the day, your processes are so complex that you’ll want to rely on a SaaS accounting and software expert. With the guidance of experts, like the SaaS team at AcctTwo, you can not only automate today’s manual processes, you can actually build a foundation to grow with your company as it continues to expand organically, or through acquisition.

Automate Your SaaS Metrics

Now that you’re thinking about automating your SaaS and subscription finances, it might also be time to think about automating your most crucial SaaS metrics and KPIs. The experts at AcctTwo have a solution built specifically for subscription and software companies called SaaS Intelligence that automatically analyzes and buckets your accounting transactions into CMRR buckets. This automation provides SaaS metrics at a level of granularity undetected and unreported in comparable solutions.

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For example, while other applications may track general “Contraction,” they lack visibility into the underlying causes of revenue retention issues. SaaS Intelligence exposes the distinction between Downgrades and Markdowns to illuminate product-related attrition issues versus sales price reductions and discounting behaviors. Both of these will result in Contraction, but knowing exactly what’s happening on which Products for which Customers enables more effective action planning.

The SaaS experts at AcctTwo are ready to help you graduate to a cloud-based, real-time, single source of truth and insights. AcctTwo is the reigning 7-time Sage Intacct Partner of the Year, and 4-time Inc. 5000 List winner, and is top-rated by their customers on G2. Contact AcctTwo today to prepare for tomorrow.