Has your small-to-medium-sized (SMB) business outgrown the capabilities of your current accounting software? If so, you may be overdue for an upgrade.
When it comes time to replace your underperforming technology, you have plenty of solutions to choose from. However, the best option for growing SMBs is Oracle NetSuite, a dynamic enterprise resource planning (ERP) and accounting solution with many tools and features.
NetSuite is the world’s #1 business system on the market. By embracing this robust solution, you’ll enjoy numerous Oracle NetSuite benefits that will take your business to the next level.
Let’s take a closer look at these benefits, why NetSuite is good for SMBs, and examine whether your business is ready to migrate.
Is My Business Ready for an Upgrade?
Life as a business owner is often fast-paced and sometimes downright hectic. With so much on your plate, putting off a technology upgrade may be tempting, even if it feels necessary. However, delaying an upgrade can undermine your long-term growth and lead to costly setbacks that diminish your profit margins.
On the other hand, upgrading too soon can leave you feeling overwhelmed. The question is, how do you know if your business is ready to upgrade its technology stack?
While your business and its needs are unique, you should strongly consider investing in Oracle NetSuite during these situations.
1. Are in a Period of Growth
During periods of growth, your business has built up solid forward momentum. The last thing you should do is take your foot off the gas. Instead, you should accelerate your growth by deploying a robust technology solution like NetSuite in your industry.
Upgrading your tech stack when everything is going smoothly may seem counterintuitive. But do you really want to wait until your current software can no longer meet your needs?
2. Lack of Real-Time Insights
Can you access real-time insights about business performance, sales, and cash flow at the touch of a button, or do you have to track down an obscure spreadsheet only to waste your time looking over data that are days or even weeks old?
If the latter has become the norm at your business, you’re overdue for a technology boost.
Regardless of your industry, you need to be able to make informed decisions fast. If you react too slowly, prime opportunities will pass you by. A modern solution like NetSuite will empower you to access real-time insights that you can use to guide all your important business decisions.
3. Fear Adding Sales Channels or Product Lines
Have you put off adding product lines or sales channels because you don’t have the time or resources to accommodate the change? This decision is common when using basic accounting software, as these solutions don’t have the built-in support necessary to facilitate making SKU changes or adding new sales tax rates.
Do you want to keep pumping the brakes on your business growth, or do you want to set the stage for your venture’s continued success? If you’re set on the latter option, you need a cloud-based ERP that enables you to add products and channels without taking on countless hours of unnecessary work.
4. Rely on Guesswork
When it’s difficult to get historical performance data, you must fill in the blanks by making inferences. In other words, you’re relying on guesswork to drive decision-making, which is a recipe for disaster.
Even if this approach has gotten you where you are today, you’ll eventually make a costly misstep. Fortunately, you can avoid such a calamity by upgrading to a technology platform that facilitates accurate, timely forecasting and budgeting.
5. Have Ambitious 1–5 Year Growth Goals
Just because you aren’t currently in a period of growth doesn’t mean you won’t be in the near future. If you have aspirations of expanding your brand (and let’s be realistic, every business owner does), you must prepare for your next growth initiative by putting the right technology in place.
Investing in software solutions proactively ensures that you have the tools and resources necessary to capitalize on your next significant growth opportunity, whether it arises next month or several years from now. Be prepared when opportunity knocks at your door.
Nine Undeniable Oracle NetSuite Benefits
By adopting Oracle NetSuite, your organization can realize tangible benefits. Consider the following nine examples.
1. Avoid Unnecessary Hiring
Taking on too many new team members too quickly can leave you with a bloated payroll and excessive overhead expenses. Remember, expanding your operations and finance teams will also require you to invest in additional HR resources to manage these new employees.
Oracle NetSuite allows you to delay finance and operation hires by optimizing the productivity of your existing resources.
With NetSuite, you can automate traditionally manual processes, freeing up your in-house staff to focus on core tasks and mission-critical activities. While there will come a time when you need to expand your staff, you can put it off until your cash flow can accommodate the additional payroll.
2. Modernize Billing and Invoicing
Manual data entry processes are time-consuming, tedious, and inefficient. To make matters worse, these processes open the door for potentially costly data entry errors that can lead to cash flow issues and payment delays. If you have aspirations of growing your business, you must refine these processes.
Oracle NetSuite helps you prepare for growth by modernizing your billing and invoicing functions:
- Automate most aspects of billing.
- Efficiently forward invoices to clients.
- Stabilize cash flow.
You can then reinvest income into your company to keep your momentum going instead of spending time chasing down customers to pay invoices.
3. Reduce Manual Data Entry
When you rely on manual data entry and spreadsheet-based accounting, your company will be plagued by lengthy financial close times. You’ll also be forced to bog down your employees with manual data entry responsibilities.
Oracle NetSuite solves both of these problems by enabling you to automate everything from journal entries to A/P bill generation.
You can create custom controls for approvals to ensure that every transaction follows organizational policy. These capabilities will also allow you to reduce month-end processing costs and improve the accuracy of your financial data.
4. Stay Audit-Ready
If you operate in a heavily regulated sector like the financial or healthcare industry, a mere mention of the word “audit” probably elicits feelings of dread and frustration.
Audits have become particularly tedious in recent years due to ever-evolving compliance regulations. Heavy spreadsheet utilization makes complying with these standards even more challenging.
But what if you could stay audit-ready year-round and generate requested reports in minutes? With Oracle NetSuite, you can.
This powerful ERP platform levels the playing field for small accounting teams by providing staff with robust yet easy-to-use reporting tools. You can use these tools to reduce audit costs and expedite the review process by creating detailed accounting reports at a moment’s notice.
5. Set the Stage for Innovation
Before you launch a new product or break into an adjacent market, you must conduct extensive research and perform due diligence to ensure your plan is fiscally viable. Completing these tasks manually can take months and may cause you to miss out on fleeting growth opportunities.
With Oracle NetSuite, you can quickly launch or modify your business model to fuel expansion efforts. The platform’s dynamic framework enables you to reach international markets, introduce your products to new audiences, and scale your business like never before.
Oracle NetSuite supports dozens of currencies, entities, and accounting standards, allowing you to do business on your terms.
6. Stop Playing “Find the Spreadsheet”
Ever wasted an entire morning hunting futilely for a specific spreadsheet so you could review financial data or prepare an important report? Putting off important tasks while you search for an elusive document doesn’t just ruin your momentum for the day – it’s also incredibly unproductive.
But if you rely on spreadsheets as your primary accounting tool, you’ll find yourself playing this frustrating game of hide-and-seek at least a few times per quarter. Just imagine how much time you could have spent optimizing your operations or increasing your revenue you’ll lose over the course of even one year.
By contrast, Oracle NetSuite allows you to query relevant data in seconds. This robust solution unifies all your essential business data, including accounting documents, invoices, and much more. With NetSuite, you can put an end to wasted mornings and start your day off productively.
7. Unify Disparate Systems
Oracle NetSuite does much more than just unify your data. It also replaces disconnected pieces of software with a fully integrated solution that can handle all your accounting and enterprise resource planning needs.
You’ll no longer have to transition between a spreadsheet, rudimentary accounting software, and other apps to generate a single report. Instead, you can efficiently transition between NetSuite’s various tools and menus to generate reports, review performance data, manage resources, and perform other crucial tasks.
8. Improve Organizational Visibility
Even if your business is relatively small, you no doubt still collect, store, and manage a significant amount of organizational data.
From customer emails to sales figures, it can be difficult keeping track of all this data, much less putting it to use to guide decision-making. Keeping up with your company data can be especially difficult if you’re using disjointed systems that don’t share information or communicate.
Oracle NetSuite was designed to maximize organizational visibility by providing you with a single source of truth.
You can use the NetSuite interface to access real-time insights about the state of your business. Whether you want to check out yesterday’s sales volume or see how many customers you have on your mailing list, Oracle NetSuite can accommodate your request.
9. Engage in Accurate Sales Forecasting
Consumer habits can be incredibly unpredictable and are in a state of constant flux. But modern technologies like analytics software and artificial intelligence solutions have made it possible to conduct accurate sales forecasting.
Contrary to popular belief, these solutions aren’t just for massive enterprises.
Oracle NetSuite levels the playing field for SMBs by providing business owners and managers access to sophisticated sales and demand forecasting tools. You can use these tools to guide purchasing decisions, prepare for potential demand dips, and plan for the future.
Enjoy a Frictionless NetSuite ERP Deployment with Finlyte
Are you ready to experience the Oracle NetSuite benefits we highlighted and promote the ongoing growth of your business? If so, the first step involves finding a NetSuite implementation partner to facilitate your technology deployment.
Finlyte specializes in planning and facilitating Oracle NetSuite implementations. Our award-winning team provides specific implementation support:
- Create a strategy for deploying the NetSuite software.
- Oversee the migration to NetSuite.
- Complete the entire migration process with minimal disruption to your business.
- Provide post-implementation support to maximize your return on investment.
Ready to learn more about how to tap into the many benefits of Oracle NetSuite and transform your business? Schedule a consultation with Finlyte today.
