Are QuickBooks’ Shortcomings Holding Your Restaurant Group Back? | Tbsp

As most growing restaurant groups know, there is a ticking time limit to QuickBooks. While the QuickBooks-and-Excel combination may have served you well, however; there are inevitable drawbacks that can limit growth. You start to miss out on the benefits of a financial management system that offers strategic, collaborative budgeting and fast, accurate reporting. CIO, one of the leading publishers focused on business technology and digital transformation, released a tech dossier based on a survey of 207 QuickBooks users.

They detected that the top challenges reported with QuickBooks were:

• Suboptimal speed and efficiency
• Limited data integrity checks
• Limited customizability

According to the survey, half of the users said they would like better reporting capabilities, followed closely by 45% wanting more accurate data and 44% seeing the need to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

In addition, they identified three main QuickBooks frustrations. They are:

1. Lost productivity due to time-consuming manual processes
2. Staying current with compliance and security requirements
3. Aggregating data from multiple systems and sources

The second recent survey, conducted by CFO Dive, found similar results, all captured in a new report entitled How QuickBooks isn’t Keeping Pace with CFO Needs. CFO Dive spoke with 164 financial executives and found that three out of four finance executives say going back and forth between QuickBooks and spreadsheets is frustrating to their financial teams. Finance executives use these spreadsheets to get the information and reporting they need daily, which points out a significant shortcoming in QuickBooks reporting.

In addition, these survey respondents noted additional QuickBooks challenges, including:

• Data accessibility issues (29%)
• High occurrence of imbalances/troubleshooting (27%)
• Too much manual data entry and reentry (26%)
• Upgrades/maintenance (26%)

In addition, the most significant disadvantage of QuickBooks is that it is a generic business solution. It doesn't support standard P&L formats commonly used in the restaurant industry, nor does it natively support different reporting periods other than the standard calendar month format. QuickBooks comes with a standard chart of accounts, which only includes a few items you need for restaurants. There are restaurant charts available, but you must create these manually.

Because of this, you’ll spend more time in Excel than in QuickBooks to manually manipulate data and format it for restaurant-specific reporting.

Four Triggers You Are Outgrowing QuickBooks

As CFO Dive found, there are usually specific triggers that signal companies are outgrowing QuickBooks and move to a robust, modern cloud-native solution. These include:

1. Spending too much time on spreadsheets
2. Multiple business entities with no consolidated charts of accounts
3. Seeking outside investment that would require you to be GAAP compliant
4. Remote data access requirements

CIO noted the following in its tech dossier: "Monolithic software is difficult to update and troubleshoot because the entire application must be put on the operating table. That's why software makers have historically updated their products at most once or twice a year. As a result, even relatively minor bug fixes can require a full reinstallation and test cycle.

"Modern, cloud-native software takes advantage of cloud constructs to reimagine how software is built. Microservices are loosely coupled software components that each perform a specific task. As a result, developers can chain services together to build sophisticated applications much more quickly than they could in a monolithic environment. In addition, each microservice is tested and optimized for performance."

Here are just two ways Sage Intacct outshines QuickBooks for your growing restaurant company:

1. Consolidate multiple entities in minutes. Sage Intacct overcomes the limitations of QuickBooks and makes it easy to report across multiple locations and entities. Automate the spectrum of consolidation activities, like currency conversions, inter-entity transactions, system-wide roll-ups, and more. With Sage Intacct restaurant financials, you eliminate the wasted effort of manual consolidations, close the books faster, and bring on growth.
2. Gain visibility with dashboards and real-time reports—and without the Excel hassles. With Sage Intacct, you get the right information tracked and presented in real-time so you can make the course corrections that lead to repeatable, profitable growth. In addition, you can easily create real-time dashboards across one or more entities or stores—without exporting to Excel. And Sage Intacct's report center gathers all your reports in one place—no more searching for different modules for the reports you want.

Moving to the Cloud

For many of you using QuickBooks Desktop, replacing it with a cloud platform might sound overwhelming. However, you will come to a point when the benefits of a cloud-based platform make sense. In addition, cloud-based solutions have lower upfront costs and capital expenditure, faster deployment, and easier administration.

Cloud-native financial management platforms combine the customizability of on-premises offerings with 24x7 access, higher security, and lower cloud maintenance.

In our three-part series, “Questions to Ask When Choosing Restaurant Accounting Software," we cover the security of cloud-based software. Our two biggest takeaways are:

1. Using a cloud-based financial system lets you tap into a world-class infrastructure. Your vendor amortizes costs over thousands of customers, so they can maintain world-class infrastructure and provide you with 24x365 operations, continuous backups, disaster recovery, and superior security. This offers you a far higher level of performance, reliability, and security than you can afford.
2. Most cloud-computing vendors partner with elite data center providers that provide the backbone of their offerings. Find out who those partners are. Where are the data centers located? Do they have business-continuity contingencies? What security standards have they adopted? Can they deliver guaranteed and appropriate levels of uptime? How do they prevent, detect, and remediate physical and network security breaches? Thoroughly evaluate each vendor's network operations center and technology infrastructure.

In addition, cloud-native solutions deliver the full benefits of the cloud due to their use of cloud technology, de facto standards, and open APIs. As a result, they are easier to integrate, scale, and adapt, delivering a flexible system to meet your future needs.

QuickBooks Comes Up Short for Restaurant Groups

Restaurant groups need their financial reporting and forecasting solutions to expand and scale. QuickBooks cannot offer the same level of detail and accuracy needed with dimensions, recurring revenue, and forecasting.

Spreadsheets and finance have gone together for decades. Accounting directors, managers, controllers, and CFOs have mastered the complexities of Excel. VLOOKUP, INDEXMATCH, pivot tables, reporting, macros, Excel visual basic, and data simulations are all advanced tools accounting departments have employed to get information from complex spreadsheets.

Useful as they are, spreadsheets are a crutch and a weak one at that. And if you're using QuickBooks, you only have a few options other than spreadsheets to get the information you need to make data-driven decisions. Fixed-asset management, consolidation, and revenue recognition are just three areas where QuickBooks needs to improve. So if you're current accounting solution forces you to use spreadsheets to get the insights you need, it's time to look for a better alternative.

With more than 80% market share, it is the most popular small business accounting application. However, if you are experiencing any of the following symptoms, it might be time to look for a more robust finance and accounting platform:

• You are consistently using other programs to build reports
• Your restaurant group has multiple entities, and reporting is a nightmare
• Entering transactions, creating bills, pulling reports, etc., takes too long
• There is a lack of financial visibility needed to make timely business decisions
• Excessive manual processes are turning out to be costly and error-prone

If any of the above strikes a nerve, the following challenges might send you toward a more robust solution. QuickBooks wasn’t designed to provide growing restaurant groups with sophisticated, evolving demands. Contact our team if you are outgrowing QuickBooks.