Experiencing “accounting growing pains” is a natural part of the evolution from a small business to market leader, especially when making plans for expansion.
You might be attempting to open new stores, warehouses or offices, or looking to increase your business complexity such as adding companies or subsidiaries.
You might wish to expand beyond your province, state or country borders, or you might simply want to grow your volume of transactions.
This means that at some point of your expansion, you’ll have to deal with multi-currency, multi-language and multi-national tax, audit and compliance requirements, often across multiple subsidiaries, branches or divisions.
You’ll also need to consolidate financial and business information—again in multiple currencies and languages—while wrestling with limited visibility at the regional and global level.
How to know if you’ve outgrown your accounting software
If you’re becoming increasingly frustrated that you can’t customise reports, that data is not updated in real-time and that information can’t sync across multiple locations, it’s time to re-think your tools and move to a unified application platform with more robust architectural support.
Do you find yourself making important decisions based on guesswork, producing forecasts without information on a real-time basis, generating reports that require manual intervention and without real-time access to reliable information?
These are clear signs that your software ecosystem may no longer be effective and that your business is essentially “flying blind.”
On top of this If you find that employees are creating their own tracking systems on spreadsheets and Word documents and emailing them around, your existing system may no longer be meeting your present operational needs.
As businesses grow, the need to have a holistic view across accounting departments and all operations become critical.
By unifying the front and back office, NetSuite, for example, gives companies access to the true financial and operational status of the organisation in real-time, with full visibility to operate at the speed of a high-growth business that drives results and scale.
Digital technology consultants Brillio, based in California and Karnataka, is a corporation with over 2,000 employees.
After switching to NetSuite’s cloud-based platform, the real-time visibility across roughly 400 projects allowed their leaders to streamline expense reporting systems, better manage resources and deliver to their customers on time and on budget.
As your business grows in complexity as well as size, you will retain a clear picture of exactly how to maximise your revenue, reduce your cost burden or drive operational optimisation of your business.
To find out more about NetSuite and how it works click here.