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One of the critical factors that directly influence your business’ success is how you handle your financial management. There is, at times, an overwhelming amount of decisions that have to be made to keep your business to an excellent professional level.
One of those decisions is how to choose the right business accounting software that will assist you in your daily tasks. A good solution will help you automate mundane tasks, give you a good overview, manage your brooks, and help you create plans for the upcoming periods.
If you have been thinking about this and started to look into different accounting software, you are probably aware that there are many options out there with different specificities. You’ve likely come in touch with two of the biggest names in the industry- Quickbooks and NetSuite.
Both tools will help your business manage the accounting processes, however, they do have quite different features. If you are not sure what your business needs, keep reading my thorough comparison of Quickbooks Vs. NetSuite.Quickbooks and NetSuite.
The biggest difference between Quickbooks and NetSuite
Quickbooks and NetSuite are both cloud-based financial management software that are created to assist businesses with running their processes effectively.
The biggest difference between them is that QuickBooks mainly focuses on small business’ accounting solutions, whereas NetSuite provides a variety of enterprise-grade applications that cover areas outside of accounting and finance as well.
That is why for many years QuickBooks has been the software that most of the small businesses start with, but as their business scales, they start searching for something more.
Quickbooks Overview
Quickbooks was founded in 1998 and to this date more than 1.8 million customers use it, which makes it the largest provider of accounting software when it comes to small businesses.
The services that are offered by Quickbooks are used to managing payrolls, inventory, sales, paying bills, preparing taxes, generating reports, and other accounting and finance needs of small entities.
There are several types of solutions offered depending on the size of the business and the specific needs. Both an individual freelancer and a mid-sized business can find what they need within the alternatives.
Quickbooks offers three main plans for businesses and they are:
- Simple Start- which will cost you $7.5 per month (price applicable at the time of writing of this article). The functionalities that you will get with this plan are:
- Track income and expenses
- Send custom invoices and quotes
- Connect your bank
- Track VAT
- One user + accountant
- Essentials- which will cost you $11.5 per month (price applicable at the time of writing of this article). The functionalities you’ll enjoy by purchasing this plan, in addition to the ones from the Simple Start plan, are:
- Reports and insights
- Managing employees
- Multi-currency
- Three users + accountant
- Plus- which will cost you $15.5 per month (price applicable at the time of writing of this article). Additional functionalities in addition to all the previously mentioned are:
- Recurring transactions
- Inventory tracking
- Projects and locations tracking
- Budget management
- Five users + accountant
Quickbooks Enterprise
If your business needs more than just accounting, Quickbooks offers their Quickbook Enterprise addition with which you can do inventory management, build reports, do sales, time tracking, and do payrolls.
135.000 companies are using Quickbook Enterprise. It has a capacity of one million customers, vendors, and inventory items. Additionally, 40 users are allowed to use it. It can be customized to some extent according to the needs of specific businesses.
Quickbooks enterprise is a desktop program and if you prefer to take it off-premises, you would need to get a third-party hosting company. This can complicate things, and force you to manage one more vendor.
There are some shortcomings with Quickbooks Enterprise like for example it does not automate processes like asset management, multidimensional reporting, subscription billings, etc.
It just offers a more traditional-like chart of accounts that is aiming to make things less complex, however, sometimes it does quite the opposite.
NetSuite Overview
NetSuite can be considered the leading cloud-based ERP solution for automating many of your business’ processes like managing your finances, revenues, order management, billing, management of inventory, and much more.
With NetSuite, businesses that are into any stage of the growth process can get a platform with real-time data, customization, and dashboards connected to their finances. In other words, NetSuite is not only about the accounting of a business, but it provides a wide array of other functionalities throughout the whole business.
NetSuite, moreover, meets global accounting and compliance standards which are very important for businesses.
Brex also uses NetSuite to ensure it’s meeting global accounting and compliance standards while delivering corporate credit cards to startups.
Things like eCommerce, CRM, HR management software, automation of services, and much more. Since it’s a cloud-based solution, real-time data without additional IT infrastructure is available to the businesses. With just one solution, you can pretty much run your whole business without having to include other types of vendors.
Relevant: Also read here Top Reasons That Make NetSuite The #1 Cloud ERP
NetSuite lets you choose solutions by different parameters like:
- By the business type (whether you’re a startup, a fast-growing business, a family-owned business, a small, midsize, PE-backed, enterprise, or VC backed.
- By role (CEO, CFO, Controller, CIO)
- By current software (Quickbooks, Microsoft, Sage, Intacct, SAP, Deltek, Epicor)
When it comes to pricing, their prices are determined separately for each business and are based on a lot of factors such as total user count, extra required modules as add-ons, ERP configuration, and other things.
The base license is $999 per month with a cost for access per user for $99 per month. You can renew it on a yearly basis or for longer periods. If you have general needs, some pre-bundled editions can be quickly fitted with your needs.
Quickbooks vs NetSuite
If you are a very small business or a startup, Quickbooks might be the obvious choice for you because it will take care of your basic accounting needs like paying bills, managing invoices, and basic tracking of cash flow.
It’s a simple software for simple needs like businesses with minimal accounting demands that just need to generate monthly or yearly reports and take care of taxes.
On the other hand, NetSuite offers all of that, and a complete financial management solution for businesses whose needs become more diverse and complex with time. As I previously mentioned, NetSuite can be tailored to suit the specific businesses’ needs and offers a much more complex set of functionalities.
Feature comparison
Both platforms check off some important boxes for accounting and financing purposes, but the main difference is in the specific features that they offer. If we compare them, we will notice that NetSuite is by far the superior software solution.
This is especially true for companies that are growing or are expecting to begin growing soon. The wide array of functionalities in the accounting and finance sectors can have a significant impact on the time and resources spent in the working of the business.
1. In the area of financial management, Quickbooks offers some basics like
- accounts payable
- account receivable
- general ledger
- Multi-currency
- budgeting.
NetSuite offers all of those and additional features like:
- revenue recognition
- subscription billing
- forecasting
- financial planning
- financial analysis
- and much more.
2. When it comes to supply chain management, with Quickbooks you will get
- Inventory management
- Order management
- Procurement
NetSuite offers those, and additional features like
- Production management
- Demand planning
- WIP and routing
- Work orders and assemblies
- Warehouse and fulfillment
- And more.
3. Moving onto the e-commerce and retail industry, Quickbooks offers its assistance by giving you features like
- Point of sale
- E-commerce
NetSuite additionally offers
- Order management
- Inventory management
- Product content management
- Ecommerce marketing automation
4. Another target area is human capital management. Quickbooks offers only payroll. Netsuite on the other hand has something more to offer like human resources management, employee center, and analytics.
In addition to all of this, when it comes to professional service automation, Quickbook lacks to offer any functionalities which can be a big minus. NetSuite offers functionalities like project management, resource management, timesheet management, and expense management. This is a very big plus on the side of NetSuite because in this day and age businesses aspire to automate as many processes as possible. With that, they will minimize the time and resources spent on several tasks within the organization.
The take-away
If there is one thing you take away from this article is that you have to consider the future growth of your business when choosing the right accounting and finance solution.
Right now, your business might be a startup or a small business with basic needs that can be covered pretty much with any solution out there. But as your company grows, the number of employees and customers increases, you will need to have automation and data analysis.
Choosing Quickbooks for a startup or a small business can seem like a great idea; it will for sure take care of your basic needs. However, once your needs increase and you need to add vendors, have data in Excel sheets, or include additional accounting or finance tools, that’s when it gets difficult. Managing all these different sources can be time-consuming and cost you more recourses than necessary. The probability of errors is increased in this case, and creating reports or analysis can be downright impossible or very complex.
With NetSuite, you can achieve that on one platform, with a few clicks. That is why it is not rare to see companies that have settled for Quickbooks to mitigate their business to NetSuite just within a year or two because they expanded in that period growing their need significantly.
What do you think it’s the most important thing for a software like this to have? Drop a comment below letting me know!
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