Does your business have the tools it needs to support business growth? Or are the systems you’re using holding your business back?
I recently participated in a webinar, Keeping Ahead of Change, with Sage’s VP of Product Marketing, Diane Haines. We discussed a common dilemma that many SMBs face. While today’s business environment offers SMBs plenty of opportunities to innovate and grow, many find themselves unprepared because they’re still relying on software solutions that worked when they were very small, but can no support business growth.
Accounting software is often the first business software small businesses buy. Many times, small business owners opt for the least expensive or easiest accounting solution they can find, and add new software to help with other functions as needed.
Tacking on point solutions, spreadsheets and manual workarounds can get the job done for a while. But, as businesses grow, they become more complicated (Figure 1). You hire more employees, and create more offerings. Different regulatory requirements start kicking in, and maybe you are in more markets. Business growth and profitability are still extremely important priorities, but other issues start coming to the forefront.
Figure 1: As Businesses Grow, Challenges Change
At a certain point, solutions that used to work no longer fit your needs. Trying to manage a growing business with a jumble of different solutions, spreadsheets and pencil and paper creates a drag on the business, and you wind up spending too much time just keeping up with the day-to-day. As a result, it’s tough to be proactive, and to take advantage of new opportunities to grow in a scalable way.
The top five warning signs that the software you’re using today may be holding your business back include:
- Too Much Time, Too Many Errors. Accounting software is supposed to make running the business easier. But if you’ve outgrown the solution, you’re probably spending too much time creating “customized” reports outside the accounting software for things like billing, payments, and sales forecasts. Users may have to re-enter info into different programs and documents, and have to update and reconcile multiple spreadsheets–which is not only time-consuming, but greatly increases the risk of errors.
- Poor Visibility Into Data for Decision-Making. All businesses need to track and measure metrics and key performance indicators, but many struggle to do this efficiently. Many SMBs feel like they’re in information overload. You have plenty of data, but can’t find the right data when you need it, or it’s difficult to pull the data into a unified view to see how different aspects of the business work together. For instance, it may take days or weeks to generate reports required by different stakeholders, or take too long to close the books. Without a more comprehensive business management system that automates and integrates information across the business, it becomes more difficult to manage, measure and make the right decisions as a business grows.
- Everyone Has Their Own Version of the Truth. When people rely on different spreadsheets and reports, generated with different data from different systems, they can end up with very different views of what’s going on and what actions they need to take. When this happens, decision-makers can waste precious time reconciling these different views and finding common ground to base decisions on.
- Insufficient Time/Resources To Grow the Business. When you spend too much time on day-to-day business processes, its tough to carve out the time and resources to do things that will really move the business ahead, such like upgrading front end sales and marketing to attract new customers, or improving customer service so existing customers become repeat customers advocates for your business.
- Poorly Equipped for Business Expansion. If you are looking to expand your business to new countries, you need to be able to track exchange rates, convert currencies and consolidate financials across the business, and the entry-level accounting software you have can’t easily accommodate this. Similarly, if you want to add new product or services, or add a direct B2C channel to supplement your B2B business, things can get cumbersome and clunky if you have to use a lot of workarounds.
If any of these top five warning signs sound familiar, its time to think about how you can manage your business in a more automated, integrated and sustainable way. But change can be hard, even when the need to change is clear. Tune into the Keeping Ahead of Change webinar to learn more about these challenges, how a more complete business management solution can benefit your business, and advice for how to how to start managing your business in a more automated, integrated manner so you’ll be ready for opportunity when it knocks.