QuickBooks Online is one of the most well-known financial management solutions for small businesses on the market today. It offers a wide range of products and functionality that can meet the requirements of your business. Many small to medium-sized companies find that QuickBooks Online provides the financial and customer management they need. However, QuickBooks Online has limited functionality that helps you as your business grows.
QuickBooks Online is a valuable asset if you’re a micro or small business offering a small product or professional services list and operating under ten employees. Another way to look at this is if all your customer transactions are within a 25-mile radius and your monthly sales ledger is about two pages long, and you store your inventory in a small warehouse attached to your office, QuickBooks Online likely provides all the functionality you need.
However, if you find these business elements creating issues and see your business moving from small to mid-sized, then moving from QuickBooks Online to an ERP system may give you the functions you need to expand your sales radius and realize the growth potential. There are two performance indicators to look at when thinking of moving from QuickBooks Online to an ERP system.
Even if you’re not facing the plateau with QuickBooks Online, you need to consider distinct differences between Acumatica Cloud ERP and QuickBooks Online.
| Functionality | Acumatica ERP | QuickBooks Online |
| True Mobility | ||
| Full Relational Database Export | ||
| Customization using industry-standard tools | ||
| Flexible Licensing based on customer requirements | ||
| Multiple Deployment Options | |
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| Scale as you grow | |
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| Superior Return on Investment | |
QuickBooks Online is designed to be a basic accounting solution rather than a complete business management system.
Acumatica Cloud ERP provides not only financial management tools, instead it is tailored to specific industries to provide a complete business software solution for customer management, inventory, warehouse management, manufacturing, field service management, equipment maintenance, project accounting, contracts recurring billings, payroll, and more. In addition, it combines a full-scale ERP with MRP and Customer Resource Management (CRM) to go beyond basic accounting and provides all the tools to manage tasks, processes, and operations across your company. As your business grows, these functions are essential to enable data flow across departments, streamline processes, centralize data, and allow you to manage everything in one system.
| Functionality | Acumatica ERP | QuickBooks Online |
| Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable | ||
| Accounts Receivable | ||
| General Ledger | ||
| Cash Management | ||
| Payroll | ||
| Job Costing | ||
| Fixed Assets | ||
| Inter-Company Accounting | ||
| Multi-Currency and Multi-Language Support | ||
| PCI-Compliant Payments | ||
| Customer Relationship Management (CRM) | ||
| User-Defined Workflows | ||
| Customizable, Role-Based Dashboards | ||
| Document Management | ||
| Open APIs and Web Services Integrations | ||
| Mobile Device Access (anywhere, anytime) | ||
| Unlimited Users |
QuickBooks Online licensing is user-based. This means that you’ll need to add or redistribute licenses for additional users over time as your business grows. In addition, QuickBooks Online limits personnel using the system simultaneously without additional licensing, and even that is limited to a maximum number of licenses you can buy.
Acumatica takes a different approach to its licensing. Instead of limiting users, licenses are priced based on your business's resource usage and computing power. As a result, you can add or remove applications anytime without worrying about the number of users in the system, creating an ideal model for growth.
With QuickBooks Online, you’re limited to a maximum of 30 users. So, while it may be the right solution initially, once you grow past a specific size, you're forced to evaluate and implement a new solution to manage your business. In addition, QuickBooks Online doesn’t support multiple companies/branches. So if you need to operate multiple locations, you can’t use QuickBooks Online to manage all areas in one centralized system.
Acumatica is built with growth in mind. It offers multi-currency and multi-company business operations and has unlimited users. The user structure sets Acumatica apart from QuickBooks Online and other business management solutions. You can have as few as five employees or over 250 and still have access to all the tools and integrations you need to manage your entire business, not just your financial reporting.
QuickBooks Online may be a good starting point if you’re a small business with few employees, but if you anticipate any long-term growth, you’ll move past QuickBooks Online at some point. Investing in an ERP provides a robust set of tools to empower your business to grow without limitations. The complete solution that Acumatica Cloud ERP offers and the ability to easily integrate with other systems helps you increase the speed at which you grow because it includes marketing, customer support case management, warehouse management, manufacturing, and so much more.
Spending a bit more money now helps you avoid costly workaround solutions to complete day-to-day tasks and provides the growth potential you need to succeed in the competitive ecommerce market.