QuickBooks vs NetSuite: Choosing the Right ERP System

[00:00:04][Music] a lot of our small business community are using an erp or a new technology for the first time i'm kyler cheatham global marketing director here at third stage consulting group and i'm joined by my friend and colleague christy barber who is our small business specialist here today christine are going to kind of unpack for our small business community when it might make sense to switch from a smaller system like quickbooks to a larger erp option such as netsuite so thanks so much for joining me today christy um so when you're working with our small business clients and they may be on a quickbooks system what are some signs that they may be outgrowing that system a couple different things they'll pop up reporting quickbooks is very limited in the types of reports it can do a lot of times you have to extract the data out throw it into excel manipulate it how you want it to even customize it where when you move to erp like netsuite that we're talking about you can make customized reports inside so you can click a button and here's the data that you want to see so that's one of the big things i'll see with quickbooks you can't make decisions off the data that's in there and sometimes you have very limited data too where you can't really dig down in and extract what you need gotcha and so when you are an organization that that might be a pain point but you still aren't quite ready to go to a bigger erp system what are some things that you can do or maybe some bolt-on applications or technologies that might be able to help you kind of scale slowly yeah that's the nice thing about quickbooks it has a lot of things that can plug into it the the online version not desktop okay so that has a lot they have their own like app page and you can see if your program will fit into it and you can kind of type in the back to say hey i need a kpi or i need a metric type application to come in and help me extract the data that i need and put it into it like a dashboard and you think when you get more complex people use like a tableau and so you can find versions of software like that that could go into your quickbooks so it gets you to where you need to go and helps mitigate costs in the meantime until you're ready to afford it right and i assume talking about just budgeting that can be a big risk associated with kind of jumping into a full system like netsuite for small business communities that might not have a ton of capital on hand is that what you see yeah a lot of times and even we've had it in some of our selections we'll go through the whole selections and we'll get somebody where they need to go and they're like hey you know what we have a cash flow problem right now and it's nothing bad it's just we we know what software we want to go with we're going to need six eight months to raise the additional capital to be able to move forward and i think it's smart to do that instead of just try to spend money you don't have and then all of a sudden you need to spend more money because of something else and something else an emergency comes and now the erp that you maybe shouldn't have gone to just yet becomes a problem absolutely a liability certainly so what exactly is netsuite for those of us that are just kind of learning about hey we're at quickbooks right now what kind of value would a a bigger system like that bring to a small business organization there's a lot of great things i mean other than interface which is really nice that you can have i mean you can track inventory in the system quickbooks you can't track inventory in it it's not accurate it doesn't have the capabilities to do it unless you have a bolt-on with netsuite you have reporting in there you have purchasing everything you need inventory i want i want to produce something from a sales order or i want to take a quote and convert it to a sales order and tell my warehouse to build it or ship it and it can do all of that in the same place where quickbooks is it's a found it's a builder yeah you know you always think of it as hey i just started my business today and i need to manage finance that's the most important thing and that's what quickbooks takes care of right and so from just like a top line cost perspective what's the difference between the cost of of quickbooks and the cost of a netsuite it i mean netsuite would is significantly i mean you see on average if you have let's say you have 30 users or something you'll probably see something minimum licensing per year 75 80k a year sometimes lower depending on what your needs are with like a erp software quickbooks has a much lower entry rate i mean depending on how many users you have again because they do sell it in blocks now and depending which one you have because there's multiple versions of quickbooks if you move more to an enterprise it can get where you're you know eight grand a month sometimes which is really to me it's really expensive for not getting that much out of it yeah definitely so it sounds like you really have to know the system and be ready to really optimize your processes so that it can really help you be more productive and increase revenue yeah and knowing from day one what is what roi am i gonna get out of this and budget for that year one okay i expect to get this much return out of two three and maybe it's paid off technically in three years this software because now my company's churning i'm doing more business and what about since netsuite is a cloud system correct what about companies that say they they utilize quickbooks but they also kind of are siloed within other areas and their data might not be ready for a cloud migration do you ever see that yeah and quickbooks is one of those is a big problem oh is that yeah they're not they're very hard to extract data out of you can get your fundamental data like your chart of accounts but if let's say you build bill materials within quickbooks it's kind of a weird way to do it in their system you it is very difficult to extract that data out and a lot of times you have to hire a third party to get it and i had a client last year we had to hire a third party to be able to extract it and then still had to clean it up oh man so it's even like a an additional cost at that point um yeah and quickbooks doesn't help you they don't provide any service to say hey we'll help you because they don't want you to leave right the you know the the very friendly software vendors that we sometimes work with um so what are some signs when you are ready to migrate or i guess some some steps to take when it comes to i think i'm ready for netsuite and but i'm not sure obviously because i'm a small business owner and i wear a lot of hats and i'm certainly not a software expert what's kind of the first step to know that you might be ready um you're outgrowing the system you currently have so going back to hey i need better reporting um i can't manage my inventory now i have a lot of inventory and i may not have a third party system maybe it's just in excel and you need to be able to keep better records of that you have a growing employee where you have maybe you need to manage some hr stuff yeah and you don't have a third party taking care of that you have a multi-currency multi-uh international maybe you're bringing things in you have duty fees and there's just a lot of additional items that get noisy inside of a quickbooks where a software that can keep it all in one place you can easily take a snapshot of hey this is where everything is and that's when you kind of start to see those pain points is i'm growing i'm or i'm growing too quickly i can't keep up with what i have i need something else but i don't know is now the right time and that's something that we can help with by doing an evaluation to say yep based on you know your your retail or however you guys sell maybe you have really highs of hey these first three months the year we're so busy the next half we're slowing down so let's evaluate then that's always a good time to say okay we'll come in let's look at your company let's let's kind of evaluate how how quickly do you need something and then we can put it better into perspective and then help you get a total cost of ownership so you can start today saying yep i'm going to need to do this but i need to wait because i need to you know make sure i have additional money before purchasing yeah definitely i think that makes a ton of sense especially for the small business community is just being comfortable with knowing you know what is the price at the end of the day a lot of time for bigger organizations they can just go for an additional funds approval of a hundred thousand dollars it's easy that's not what we're talking about with small businesses it's it's um a much bigger risk to assume so i wonder if you could give us we've been talking about netsuite maybe some some drawbacks of a system like netsuite or something that you've seen in this specific comparison that might be some considerations for a small business evaluating netsuite i think the biggest thing is don't buy everything you don't need everything i mean kind of like when you go to buy a car you're like oh i want this and this and this heated seats but i live at the beach so you know i may not need this so certain things like that of just being um up front of what do you really need today because the good thing about your peace offers you can always add more and they would they would love to help you buy additional modules and advanced modules all of that right and so knowing what you need today to just get the business going that's usually the best way and a lot of times that's just finance and you can phase it you can say hey you know what we're going to move all of our finance to this new software right and i'll have maybe five users on it and it's much more affordable and then little by little maybe i'll add in hey my manufacturing is going to come over to it or my distribution side and just phase it absolutely that's a great advice kind of a scalable walk before you one approach if you will yeah so when um when you're going through these these bigger technology changes or implementation i assume within a small business community that can sometimes cause some ruffling of feathers because you just have a lot of really passionate ownership either it's generational or there's been someone in that department for 40 years so how do you help them kind of communicate the value to their teams that might be a little bit nervous about going and using a new technology yeah and i think what you said when people are in their role for a really long time there's a lot of ownership with that sure and they're like oh wait a second like i've built this yeah i don't i don't want to let it go but uh coming in day one and saying hey thank you for all this great work and here's how your work is going to transfer in and this is why i still need you and being able to articulate clearly your role is not going away it's actually going to get better because instead of maybe spending all your time over here i'm going to utilize all your skill set here in this company and putting together a strategic plan of change from right hey it's the day that we start talking to a new software to the day it's fully implemented and we're all using it yeah and how do you comment any resistance maybe intentional or not intentional when you are going through this process this person was on board but now you know they're feeling like this is a difficult software to use it's not exactly what they're used to and it's just over you know overwhelming for their day-to-day job function how do you kind of deal with that or triage that so those we usually have to well we keep a risk log the whole time okay and you have to say hey you know there's this certain scenario going on this person who is the person that's going to help take care of that problem is it a manager is it somebody higher up than that um and then it's some training it could be hey you're uneasy about this because of xyz lump let me help you or you're overwhelmed because you're doing your day job and doing this let me get somebody else to help you yeah and i've seen some some clients will come in and they'll hire some temp workers to help alleviate the work because when you're a small business i mean you're going to work all day doing your business all your job stuff and then you're going to be working on an implementation too and that's hard because you don't ever feel like you're getting anything done yeah and if you can bring in some help or you have us come in and we're project managing it more or helping you migrate your data workflows all of that that helps you as the business owner you know where it makes sense to do and you got to look at costs too it may be cheaper even though it doesn't look like it that we would come in and we're like hey we'll help you with this implementation because your employees need to keep selling and bringing the money right and it it saves money in the long run that way yeah keep the lights on definitely absolutely well any final thoughts about you know comparing a quick boats to a netsuite solution for our small business community i think it's one of those things always keep in the back of your mind that you are going to outgrow it and i always think start today putting money aside for what's going to come next that's that's yeah plan for the rainy day yeah as they say and that way when you do get to that point you're it's not a total surprise and you're a little bit more ready for it financially excellent well thank you so much for your insight today and i know christy will be presenting at our digital stratosphere conference it's a virtual conference um it's free a three-day conference february 8th through the 10th if you are watching this video in the future please go back and watch her replay of her presentation it's amazing so many great insights for our small business community you can register going to stratosphere2022.com or the description info is in our link below if you are a small business a small to medium-sized business owner and you want to speak to christy about potentially moving from quickbooks to a netsuite or a similar type system please reach out to her directly her contact info is below in the description you are watching third stage youtube channel so please subscribe we put out new videos every monday wednesday and friday thanks so much for watching and we'll see you next time [Music] you